[Author: Updated with the first trade]
Alibaba went public this morning at $92.70 — a staggering 37% pop above the striking price of $68. Within moments of the open shortly before noon — finally available to anyone who could find a seller on the open market — BABA was trading at pennies below $100 before settling back to the $93 range. Alibaba at this moment is worth $231 billion, screaming past the last great internet IPO, Facebook. Alibaba’s largest stockholder, Japanese investment giant SoftBank, was not expected to be among the first sellers. But Yahoo has said it would be, and this is good-news-bad-news for the company, as Douglas MacMillan writes in the Wall Street Journal:
The windfall, long awaited by Yahoo investors, puts pressure on Chief Executive Marissa Mayer to find new areas of growth. More than two years into her attempt to turn around the aging Internet portal, its core advertising business is shrinking and Yahoo continues to cede share of the market to Google.
Yahoo will return at least half of the Alibaba proceeds to shareholders, finance chief Ken Goldman said in July. He didn't specify whether that would take the form of a buyback or dividend.
Among the beneficiaries will be some newly-minted millionaires, Andrew Jacobs and Neil Gough write from Hangzhou, China for the New York Times:
Started here in 1999, Alibaba has followed the model of Microsoft, Google and other American technology companies, generously handing out stock to all levels of workers, from senior executives to receptionists. It has created a wealth diaspora rarely seen in China, where the economy is still dominated by state-owned enterprises, and private companies generally reserve riches for executives at the upper echelons.
The initial public offering ... will provide Silicon Valley-style payouts. At Alibaba and its affiliates, around 6,000 current and former employees owned stock worth nearly $8 billion before the I.P.O. And that sum represents only a piece of the shares doled out over the years to employees, some of whom cashed out earlier at lower, albeit still lucrative, prices.
So where does Alibaba founder Jack Ma get his inspiration? Ma reminded investors during a morning appearance CNBC's Squawk Box this morning: Forrest Gump. As he has said of the fictional poster boy for overachievers: "Forrest Gump is not a smart guy, but he is focused. He's not talented, but he is very, very hard working, and he's very simple and opportunistic."
And Ma's aspirations? "We want to be bigger than Wal-Mart ... We want people to say this is a company ... that changed the world."