Alibaba makes stunning New York debut

Jack Ma's Alibaba juggernaut has been unavoidable in the past week in China, and indeed in many other markets, after becoming the biggest initial public offering (IPO) ever in the US, raising €17 billion.

The stock opened at $92.70 (€72.19) last Friday, a price determined in a process that took more than two hours. The IPO had been priced at $68 (€52.95) late on Thursday, a 36 per cent increase from the set price.

Responsible for more than 80 per cent of online sales in China, where there are 632 million internet users, Alibaba sells more than Amazon and eBay put together, but – before this flotation process – it has hardly been a well-known brand outside China. It has 26,845 employees, €6.6 billion in annual revenue and 279 million active buyers each year.

With the number of webizens in China set to increase to 850 million next year, Alibaba is in a good place strategically.

A poll conducted by Ipsos for Thomson Reuters found that nearly 90 per cent of Americans had never heard of Alibaba, and the level of recognition in Ireland is unlikely to be much higher. But that could all be about to change.

The biggest cash earner from the IPO will be Yahoo, which received 40 per cent of Alibaba in exchange for $1 billion (€780 million) and control of Yahoo China in 2005, a move that now looks like one of the best bits of online business in the past decade.

Alibaba is basically an Amazon-like online shopping mall, an eBay-like venue for individuals to buy from other people, a business-to-business sales platform and a PayPal-like online payment platform. In contrast to Facebook and its tech brethern, Alibaba comes to the market as a tremendously profitable company.

Its brands include the Amazon-style Tmall, eBay rival Taobao and discount sales website Juhuasuan, a Chinese version of Groupon.

Alibaba was founded in 1999 by Jack Ma, a former English teacher from China's eastern city of Hangzhou, a prosperous place but still far from Silicon Valley. Ma admits to having no tech background, but has overseen the rapid rise of the company over the past 15 years.

Although he formally retired a couple of years ago, he still has a central role in deciding strategy and leadership, and he has been hailed as China's smartest chief executive by everyone from the Chinese government to Fortune magazine. He is seen as a true visionary in a country where finding people capable of "thinking outside the box" can be difficult.

There is great romance about the origins of Alibaba. The company was formed during what were still dark days in the Chinese IT world, a time when he had to tinker with an unfeasibly slow internet connection that took nearly four hours to download a page.

Martial arts and politics More recently, Ma has focused on developing t'ai chi and kung-fu skills in China with martial arts star Jet Li, but he remains one of China's most powerful people and has strong links to the ruling Communist Party, especially the premier, Li Keqiang.

Companies such as Alibaba are evidence of China’s growing clout and sophistication, along with tech stocks such as Huawei Technologies and Xiaomi.

Alibaba has been on a highly strategic, $5 billion spending spree, picking up stakes in Youku Tudou, China’s version of YouTube, and launching a film investment service, Yu Le Bao, a vehicle that works in a similar way to crowdfunding (but, crucially, not crowdfunding, which is banned in China), enabling thousands of ordinary Chinese to become micro-financiers of movies. Ma also bought AutoNavi, a Google Maps-style application for China, and UCWeb, a software developer, as well as a stake in Intime Retail, a department-store chain that he sees as part of a plan to marry online and offline retailing.

Alibaba has three data centres in China that can process more than one petabyte of data in one day, about three times the data space required to store the entire US population’s DNA.

Ma has also spent €150 million on a 50 per cent stake in the Chinese soccer club Guangzhou Evergrande, despite knowing nothing about football.

“We’re not investing in football, we’re investing in entertainment,” Ma said at the time. “Alibaba’s future strategies are health and entertainment.”