Alibaba.com Shares Trade At 160%+190%+ Premium In First Days Trading

alibaba.jpgThe IPO of Alibaba.com hit the Hong Kong Stock Exchange Tuesday (local time) with a big increase over its initial offering price.

Alibaba.com is a spinoff from the Alibaba Group, the company that owns Alipay, Taobao.com and Yahoo China and is 40% owned by Yahoo.

Applications for shares in the IPO were 256x the amount of stock available, 858.9 million shares or 17% of the company. The IPO price was HK$13.50 ($1.74) per share.

As of 12:30pm local time (+8 GMT) Alibaba.com shares were trading at HK$35.75 ($4.60), an increase of 164% on the list price.

Yahoo is a big winner from the IPO, having obtained a 8.2% stake pre-IPO that went from a paper value of $720.89 million to $1.9 billion based on the 12:30pm price.

Alibaba now has a market cap of a rather staggering $23.24 billion, significantly more than the market cap of China’s biggest search engine, the NASDAQ listed Baidu on $14.05 billion.

See our previous coverage here and here.

Update: Alibaba.com stock is now trading at HK$39.60 as at 3:40pm local time (2:40am EST). We’ll update again once the days trading closes in Hong Kong

Update 2: at the close of trade Alibaba.com stock was HK$39.50 ($5.09). Market cap is now $25.17 billion.