Financial Results
ANALYSIS: Huge Alibaba IPO Will Give US Stock Market Further Leadership, Figures Suggests
The drum-beat over the impending initial public offering of Alibaba, the Chinese online business conglomerate, got louder late last week amid reports that it is poised to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange in what could be a record-setting float.
The firm, which some reports, such as Bloomberg, say could be valued at a whopping $168 billion, would be ranked just behind International Business Machines and Oracle among the big hitters on the NYSE.
Such an IPO would – with clear relevance to wealth managers prospecting for liquidity events – creating a windfall of $40 billion for its 20,000 employees.
Reports said the NYSE listing came at the expense of the Nasdaq Stock Market, that had been competing for the honour of holding the biggest IT-related IPO since the Facebook float two years ago. And it also has beaten off competition from Hong Kong’s stock exchange – a fact noted in several commentaries. (To see a previous article about this impending event, see here.)
Alibaba has filed its IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US regulator; the filing was updated on 16 June.
When the IPO is held, it could dramatically alter the pattern of IPO data seen so far this year, according to Wealthmonitor, the research firm that has produced figures exclusively for this publication so as to put the story in context. For example, since January, there have been a total of 103 IPOs in Hong Kong and Mainland China, totalling $16.72 billion. The US leads the way, with 113 such IPOs over the same period, worth a total of $21.63 billion. Then there is, for another comparison, the UK, at 59 such floats, worth a total of almost $16 billion.
The NYSE welcomed the Alibaba listing move: “We participated in a comprehensive and deliberate exchange selection process and we are pleased to welcome Alibaba Group to the New York Stock Exchange where they will join our network of the world’s best companies and leading brands.”
The exchange added: "We haven’t seen this much activity from non-US IPOs at this point in the year since 2011."