Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. announced its initial public offering (IPO) on Friday, with its stocks soaring 38 percent within the company's first day of trading.
"This is the most anticipated event I've ever seen in my 20-year career on the floor of the NYSE," Mark Otto, partner with J. Streicher & Co, who trades on the NYSE floor, told Reuters.
"I think today's move is sustainable: The company is profitable, unlike some of its competitors, and it is a way for traders to tap into the Chinese growth story."
Alibaba Group is an online business based in Hangzhou, China that provides online retail and payment services. The site is known for functioning as a shopping search engine, similar to its American counterpart, Amazon.
The company also offers cloud storage, mobile applications, business-to-business commerce, e-learning, microblogging, music streaming and more.
Business analysts around the world have declared the company's IPO to be one of the biggest in the world, Alibaba is invested in a number of fields of industry.
Shares went from $68 on Thursday night to approximately $94 on Friday. At that price, the company raised $21.8 billion at a valuation of about $168 billion, Business Insider reports.
Alibaba was founded on April 4, 1999.
