Alibaba Group’s Hong Kong IPO confirmed

Alibaba Group has launched its Hong Kong public offering of 500,000,000 new ordinary shares on the SEHK, raising up to US$13.4 billion.

Alibaba plans to use the proceeds from the offering for the implementation of its strategies of driving user growth and engagement, empowering businesses to facilitate digital transformation, and continuing to innovate and invest for the long term.

The listing in Hong Kong will allow more of the company’s users and stakeholders in the Alibaba digital economy across Asia to invest and participate in Alibaba’s growth. In addition to expanding the company’s overall investor base, the offering will tap into substantial new capital pools in Asia and create a nearly round-the-clock market for global investors to trade Alibaba shares.

“Alibaba is guided by our mission to make it easy to do business anywhere with the vision to be a good company that lasts for 102 years,” said Alibaba Group chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang.

“We aim to serve global consumers, of which more than 1 billion will be Chinese consumers, and facilitate more than RMB10 trillion of consumption on our platform within the next five years by continuing to pursue our three strategic pillars of globalisation, domestic consumption and big data powered by cloud computing. Hong Kong is one of the world’s most important financial centres and we are grateful for the opportunity to participate in the future of Hong Kong.”

The total number of shares available under the Public Retail Offering could be adjusted up to a maximum of 50,000,000 new shares, representing 10 per cent of total shares initially available under the offering. In addition, the company expects to grant the underwriters an over-allotment option to purchase up to an additional 75,000,000 new shares.

The offer price for the Public Retail Offering will be no more than HKD188 (US$24) per share, which will be traded in board lots of 100 shares each.

The firm’s American depositary shares will continue to be listed and traded on the New York Stock Exchange.