Already marketing the largest-ever initial public offering, Alibaba on Monday upped the price of a tech deal amid voracious demand from investors.
The Chinese e-commerce giant increased the price range of shares to $66 to $68, up from $60 to $66, a price it set Sept. 5. At the new price, Alibaba could raise at the high end a whopping $25.03 billion. The company plans to sell 368.1 million shares, and it does not plan to increase the number of shares that can potentially be sold, according to the Wall Street Journal.
And the price may just keep going up. Wedbush Securities analyst Gil Luria told the AP that he expected a 12-month price target of $80 per share.
Alibaba, which is bigger than eBay and Amazon combined and processes 80 percent of all Chinese online purchases, has for the past week been on a road show to woo investors. And woo they have — investors are tripping over themselves to place stock orders for the long-awaited IPO, creating so much demand that the Chinese e-commerce giant said it will stop taking early orders. And with such a frenetic demand, Alibaba pushed the price up just days before the company begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange, which is expected to happen Friday morning, under the ticker symbol BABA.
A bigger deal means a bigger payday for Yahoo, which owns 22 percent of the company. The Sunnyvale-based search giant plans to sell more than 121 million shares, potentially worth more than $8 billion.
The fundraising target eclipses the $16 billion Facebook raised in 2012, the most for a technology IPO. It would also outpace the largest U.S. IPO, held by Visa, which raised $19.7 billion in 2008; and the all-time IPO fundraising record of $22.1 billion set by the Agricultural Bank of China in 2010.
Photo: March 17, 2014 file photo, people walk past a company logo at the headquarters of Alibaba Group in Hangzhou, in eastern China s Zhejiang province. (AP Photo)
