Alibaba has officially become the largest public offering in history, according to a report from Reuters.
The IPO was always going to be a blockbuster, but thanks to high demand which rocketed the stock up another 38% after its $21.8 billion opening, underwriters exercised an option to sell another 48 million shares. The sale means that Alibaba raked in $25 billion in its public offering, beating the previous record held by the Chinese banking behemoth, the Agricultural Bank of China, which raised $22.1 billion when it listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2010.
So… Everyone’s a winner with the Alibaba IPO, with underwriters alone netting more than $300 million from the deal.
The question is what does Alibaba do with all that paper?
All VCs want to do is take its money. And Alibaba has been on a spending spree of late, throwing roughly $1.45 billion into over 23 investments since 2013, according to an August MarketWatch report.
One possibility is that Alibaba scoops up the rest of Tango, which it has already backed to the tune of $215 million. Alibaba made the investment in Tango despite having its own messaging service, Laoiwang, according to Pamela Clark-Dickson, a senior analyst, with the boutique research and analysis firm, Ovum. Clarkson noted in a weekend analysis, that Tango’s footprint in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East would be a good opportunity for the company to build its global reach.
Over the course of its fundraising roadshow, Alibaba chairman, Jack Ma said that the company would “aggressively expand” into the U.S. and Europe. Increasingly that expansion would depend on mobile applications, according to Clark-Dickson.
If Tango is one target, Yahoo might be another. Speculation continues to swirl that either Alibaba — or its other major investor SoftBank Capital — could take a shine to the once-mighty internet property and use their windfalls to snatch up the U.S. dot-com.
Both Ma, and SoftBank Capital chairman Masayoshi Son have been cagey when asked directly what sorts of assets are on their shopping list, so the entire financial and tech community — from venture capitalists to investment bankers, to the executives at the largest tech companies in the U.S. — are waiting to see what Alibaba does next.
What’s clear is that right now… no one on the corner has swagger like the boys from Hangzhou.