Alibaba.com Goes Public

The IPO of Alibaba.com hit the Hong Kong Stock Exchange Tuesday the 6th of November 2007 with a big increase over its initial offering price.

Alibaba.com is a spinoff from the Alibaba Group, the company that owns Alipay, Taobao.com and Yahoo China and is 40% owned by Yahoo.

Applications for shares in the IPO were 256x the amount of stock available, 858.9 million shares or 17% of the company. The IPO price was HK$13.50 ($1.74) per share.

As of 12:30pm local time (+8 GMT) Alibaba.com shares were trading at HK$35.75 ($4.60), an increase of 164% on the list price.

Yahoo is a big winner from the IPO, having obtained a 8.2% stake pre-IPO that went from a paper value of $720.89 million to $1.9 billion based on the 12:30pm price.

Alibaba now has a market cap of a rather staggering $23.24 billion, significantly more than the market cap of China’s biggest search engine, the NASDAQ listed Baidu on $14.05 billion.