Text: | Print|

Alibaba's record IPO brings new investment opportunities in China

2014-09-19 15:21 Xinhua Web Editor: Qin Dexing
1

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group's successful listing on the U.S. market will provide global investors fresh opportunities to share fruits of China's economic growth, analysts said.

Alibaba on Thursday set its initial public offering (IPO) price at 68 U.S. dollars per share and raised 21.8 billion dollars, making the largest ever IPO in U.S. history.

Even though the IPO price is at the ceiling of its expected range of between 66 dollars and 68 dollars disclosed earlier, some analysts think the pricing is still conservative.

Henry Guo, senior research analyst at JG Capital, thinks Alibaba should have priced higher at IPO. "Alibaba's fair price could be 95 dollars," Guo estimated.

After the IPO pricing, everyone is interested to know where Alibaba's stocks will begin to trade.

Kenneth Polcari, director of NYSE Floor Operations at O'Neil Securities Inc., said: "I would suspect it from anywhere from 10 or 15 percent move. That would be a substantial move for a deal that size. So 15 percent is about 9 or 10 dollars move."

Jack Liu, senior vice president at Chardan Capital Markets, a New York-based investment bank, said: "I think it will be a conservative estimate if Alibaba starts trading at 75 dollars per share."

Kevin O'Leary, chairman of O'Leary Funds, is also optimistic. "I don't know if it's going to trade to 100 dollars. That sounds a little frothy to me," he told the CNBC.

"Alibaba is the first choice for international investors to share fruits of China's development," said Guo. "The company's healthy fundamentals, rapid growth and profit margin have impressed investors."

Kenneth said that the market alone in China with some 1.3 billion population is huge and people will look at it almost as a proxy of the Chinese economy.

"If you believe in what's happening around the world, if you believe in the transition of the Chinese economy to more of a market economy, I think the potential in the future is very bright," Polcari told Xinhua.

O'Leary said they may sell off some of their holdings in other U.S. internet companies to make a full allocation on Alibaba.

Analysts are confident about Alibaba's growth prospect but remained cautious about potential risks.

"Alibaba has made broad investment in areas like entertainment and media to create an 'Alibaba eco-system,' which will attract more customers. Moreover, Alibaba is also actively exploring international market," Guo said.

According to Liu, there is still a long way for China to catch up with the relatively mature U.S. market in terms of Internet penetration, the number of mobile users and Internet consumption.

Polcari said Alibaba is looking to expand into the Americas and Europe. If things go as it is expecting, certainly the potential is huge.

However, Polcari pointed out the difficulty for Alibaba to expand into territory that its U.S. rival Amazon.com already controls and to win faithful Amazon users to suddenly switch to Alibaba. "So I think it's going to be the competition for sure," Polcari said.

Guo warned of potential concerns after the company's IPO. For example, U.S. investors are not familiar with Alibaba's ownership structure, and there are still fake products on Taobao.com, China's largest consumer-to-consumer online trading site.

Alibaba, founded by Jack Ma in 1999, is one of the largest e-commerce titans in the world. It controls 80 percent of all online retail sales in China.

Comments (0)
Most popular in 24h
  Archived Content
Media partners:

Copyright ©1999-2018 Chinanews.com. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.