Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba has priced its impending IPO on the New York Stock Exchange at $68 per share, at the high end of the expected range, according to reports this afternoon by CNBC and the Wall Street Journal.
The resulting market value will be $167.62 billion out of the gate, compared with Amazon’s market value of $150 billion. Alibaba, founded by entrepreneur Jack Ma, is expected to start trading Friday morning.
The WSJ says the IPO will rank among the largest in U.S. history. In addition to its ecommerce platform in China, Alibaba has growing cloud computing platform, a smartphone operating system and even a finance business. It’s sometimes described as Amazon, PayPal and eBay combined, with a bit of Google thrown in for good measure.
