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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group on Thursday set its initial public offering (IPO) price at 68 U.S. dollars per share, setting a record-breaking IPO in U.S. history.
The price per share is at the ceiling of its expected range of between 66 dollars and 68 dollars disclosed earlier.
Offering a total of 320 million shares, the company raised 21.8 billion dollars, topping the 19.7-billion-dollar initial offering of Visa Inc. in 2008.
However, if the underwriters exercise the right to purchase up to an aggregate of 48 million additional shares granted by Alibaba, the total funds raised will reach 25 billion dollars, beating Agricultural Bank of China's IPO of 22.1 billion dollars in 2010 to be the largest in the world.
The company would be valued at 168 billion dollars at the IPO price of 68 dollars per share.
Alibaba kicked off its global roadshow on Sept. 8 in New York and received enough bookings for the offering within five days thanks to massive interests from investors.
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.
Alibaba's business model is considered as a mixture of those of Amazon and eBay. In 2013 alone, the company handled 250 billion dollars worth of merchandise, more than Amazon and eBay combined.
Alibaba's major platforms include Taobao.com, China's largest consumer-to-consumer site, and Tmall.com, where brands sell directly to consumers. It also created a Paypal-like payment system Alipay to ensure transaction safety between buyers and sellers.
Kenneth Polcari, director of NYSE Floor Operations at O'Neil Securities Inc., commented 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.
Alibaba is looking to expand into the Americas and Europe. If things go as it is expecting, certainly the potential is huge, he said.
Alibaba submitted IPO filings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on May 6, and its shares will begin trading on Friday at the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "BABA."
