Thursday, September 18, 2014

The Magic of Alibaba

The biggest talk on Wall Street this week has been tomorrow's IPO from the Chinese Internet giant Alibaba. The offering could raise as much as $25 billion, which would make it the biggest IPO in history. Facebook's IPO two years ago, which was probably the most talked-about public offering before this one, raised a mere $16 billion.

The Facebook IPO was not the largest American offering, though. Visa's IPO, shortly before the financial meltdown of 2008, raised $17.9 billion, which is also the worldwide record - at least until tomorrow. 

Will Alibaba really be worth more than that? It's often compared to Google, but as primarily an e-commerce site, it's actually closer to Amazon.com or eBay. It actually handles more transactions than Amazon.com and eBay combined, and is now China's largest retailer of any kind. That's a monster.

No comments:

Post a Comment