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If You Invested $10,000 in Alibaba's IPO, This Is How Much Money You'd Have Now
By
Leo Sun – Dec 4, 2019 at 8:16AM
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The Chinese tech giant nearly tripled in value over the past five years.
Alibaba (
BABA -3.19%) is currently China's largest e-commerce, cloud, and digital advertising company, but the tech giant had humble beginnings. Jack Ma, who started his career as an English teacher, founded the company with a team of 17 friends in his Hangzhou apartment 20 years ago.
Its first site, Alibaba.com, was a business-to-business marketplace that let Chinese companies export their products overseas. Its growth led to the launch of Taobao, a consumer-to-consumer marketplace for Chinese shoppers, in 2003. It expanded that ecosystem again with Taobao Mall (Tmall), a business-to-consumer spinoff of Taobao for bigger brands, in 2008.
IMAGE SOURCE: GETTY IMAGES.
Those three marketplaces still form the crux of Alibaba's core commerce business, which generated 85% of its revenue last quarter. Since the beginning of the new millennium, Alibaba has expanded its reach with its cloud platform, AI initiatives, streaming media platforms, and hardware devices. It also integrated the digital payments platform AliPay -- which was founded as a third-party service by Alibaba and Jack Ma -- into its e-commerce marketplaces.
Jack Ma stepped down as Alibaba's CEO in 2013, but remained the tech giant's public face throughout its IPO the following year. Alibaba finally went public at
$68 per share on Sept. 14, 2014, and raised $25 billion -- making it the
largest IPO in history. Let's see how much money you would have made with a $10,000 investment in that IPO.