Monday (Sept. 8), Chinese tech giant Alibaba kicks off its IPO roadshow as it tries to persuade prominent investors to jump into an IPO that will almost certainly become one of the largest in history.
As the first week of September 2014 wound down, Alibaba announced plans for an initial public offering that values the company at $155 billion. At that valuation, it sits a shade below Amazon’s of $160 billion
If the company sells the maximum number of shares for the currently forecasted maximum price, the deal would raise $24.3 billion for Alibaba. That would make it the largest IPO in history, besting the $22 billion raised by the Agricultural Bank of China in 2010.
Alibaba’s massive IPO will cap off what has otherwise been a very strong year for companies going public–$47 billion has been raised in IPOs on the U.S. exchanges, putting it on track to be the market’s best year since the end of the dot com bubble burst.
Alibaba’s valuation and $60-$65 initial share price came in at the low end of analyst predictions, reports The Wall Street Journal. However, it is widely anticipated that those numbers will increase in the days and weeks that follow the initial offering, as happened with both Facebook and Twitter.
According to The Journal, some analysts have pegged Alibaba’s value at closer to $220 billion.
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