Double portion of luck
Alibaba had announced in May that it would go to Wall Street for its IPO, with “summer” as a planned period and its management would prefer to launch on 8 August, as ‘Ba’ means 8 in Chinese and that number represents luck.
Seeing how ‘Ba’ appears twice in Alibaba’s name, 8 August was the chosen date for the IPO. The company also wants BABA as its ticker on the stock exchange, to emphasize the double presence of the number 8.
Largest IPO ever
Analysts have predicted for quite a while that Alibaba’s IPO might be America’s largest ever, with an expected value of 20 billion dollars (14.7 billion euro), which would trump Facebook’s IPO at 16 billion dollars (11.75 billion euro).
The August launch could however impact the numbers negatively as analysts do not believe this period is an optimal time to go to the stock exchange. Plenty of investors have a holiday period in the summer and less stock gets traded in the United States in this time frame.
Currently, Alibaba controls more than 80 % of the Chinese e-commerce, with a 248 billion dollar (182 billion euro) retail turnover in 2013. A Chinese report states that the entire Chinese e-commerce business represented 217.9 billion euro last year.
