Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) has received enough demand for its initial public offering (IPO) that it plans to stop taking orders for the record-breaking sale early, people with knowledge of the matter said.
The Chinese e-commerce giant has enough orders to sell all the shares offered in the IPO at the high end of the US$60 to US$66 per share range, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information.
Alibaba has told the team running its sale that it will stop taking orders in Asia on Wednesday next week, which is a day sooner than scheduled.
For US investors that means final orders will need to be in by Tuesday, the people said.
Alibaba still plans to set a final price for the shares on Thursday, with trading to begin the next day.
The banks running the sale expect to sift through the orders this weekend, to decide if they can raise the price range for the IPO or increase the number of shares they plan to offer, the people said.
Alibaba and shareholders, including Yahoo Inc, are seeking to raise as much as US$21.1 billion from the IPO, valuing the company at as much as US$162.7 billion, bigger than 95 percent of the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index.
Executives are in the middle of a 10-day global roadshow to meet potential investors. The first two events this week, in New York and Boston, drew as many as 1,000 people, and executives, including Alibaba founder Jack Ma (馬雲), chief financial officer Maggie Wu (武衛) and vice chairman Joe Tsai (蔡崇信), were queried about a range of topics, from the company’s governance model to its profit margins, according to people who attended the meetings.
The executives stopped in San Francisco yesterday, before hosting an event in Hong Kong on Monday, according to a schedule obtained by Bloomberg.
The company plans to keep meeting investors as scheduled even after the order book is closed, one of the people said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day