Alibaba Group went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014. Its American depositary shares began trading on September 19, 2014, under the ticker symbol BABA.
The IPO was a landmark for the Chinese internet company, which had been founded by Jack Ma and partners in Hangzhou in 1999. Alibaba offered American depositary shares rather than listing ordinary mainland Chinese shares directly on the NYSE. Each ADS initially represented one ordinary share.
The company priced the offering at $68 per ADS and raised roughly $21.8 billion before the underwriters’ overallotment option. That made it the largest initial public offering in the world at the time, surpassing Agricultural Bank of China’s 2010 listing.
A frequent confusion is the exact date: pricing was announced on September 18, while first trading occurred on September 19. Alibaba later added a secondary listing in Hong Kong in 2019, but that did not change the year of its original NYSE debut.