Did China’s Alibaba have the largest IPO in history? Maybe. Shares priced at $68 a pop and it had a market capitalization of $168 as it kicked off trading on the NYSE. This would bring the total amount raised by Alibaba’s IPO to $21.8–and a narrow miss on the current record of $22.1 billion raised by the Agricultural Bank of China in 2010. However, though the initial public offering has come and gone, there is a chance Alibaba could still come back and snatch the crown, if its corporate overlords decided to exercise some of their remaining options.
But these days, it would seem the leadership team at Alibaba can more or less do whatever it wants, wherever it wants–whether or not it comes up with the $301 million to break the record, reports The Economist.
Transactions in 2014 over its various web platforms totaled $250 billion, more than doubling those of its closest American rival Amazon’s $116 billion. Moreover, new data would suggest that Alibaba handles almost 500 orders per second, altogether worth more than $9,000 on average. In 2013 Amazon’s equivalent transaction value in 2013 would have been around $3,700 per second.
Most tellingly, however, Alibaba users are spending more. Most customers on Alibaba are spending around $1000 per year, whereas Amazon shopping is rarely topping $500.
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