Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s initial public offering became the biggest ever at US$25 billion, after bankers exercised an option to boost the deal size by 15 percent on strong demand, a person familiar with the matter said.
The underwriters exercised a so-called greenshoe option to sell an additional 48 million US depositary shares, said the person, who asked not to be identified as the information is private.
Credit Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup Inc managed the offering.
Shares of Alibaba soared 38 percent on their trading debut on Friday, the biggest first-day jump for an IPO of at least US$10 billion, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Its dominance of a booming e-commerce industry in the nation of 1.36 billion people attracted interest from money managers including Fidelity Investments, BlackRock Inc and T. Rowe Price Group Inc, who each asked for at least US$1 billion of shares, people familiar with the matter said last week.
“Expectations for this company are sky high,” Li Muzhi, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Arete Research Service LLP, said yesterday by phone.
“The market seems to be using Alibaba as an proxy for the macroeconomy and consumer economy,” the analyst added.
The number of Chinese Internet users has grown to 632 million, greater than the population of any other nation except India, and could exceed 850 million by 2015, government data show.
Alibaba, led by billionaire chairman Jack Ma (馬雲), surpassed Facebook Inc by market capitalization from the minute it started trading and closed with a valuation of US$231.4 billion, making it larger than Amazon.com Inc and eBay Inc combined.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier yesterday that the company had exercised the greenshoe option, citing unidentified people.
McKinsey & Co predicts online commerce in the world’s second-largest economy will reach US$395 billion next year, tripling its 2011 level. Alibaba’s retail platforms helped generate 6.1 billion package shipments in the 12 months ended June, accounting for 54 percent of the nation’s total, the company said last month.
The Chinese e-commerce company’s sale, already the biggest in the US, surpassed Agricultural Bank of China Ltd’s (中國農業銀行) US$22.1 billion IPO in 2010 as the world’s largest after the greenshoe was exercised, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
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