Alibaba valued at $228bn as trading begins

Somewhat eccentrically, he added that he looked up to Forrest Gump, the fictional protagonist of the film of the same name, whose mantra is that "life is like a box of chocolates" because "you never know what you're going to get".

“Every time I’m frustrated, I watch the movie,” he said. “I watched the movie again before I came here. It’s telling me, ‘no matter whatever changes, you are you.’”

Mr Ma rang the bell to open the New York Stock Exchange, marking the start of a nerze-wracking wait for Alibaba to start trading. However, a spokesman for trading platform said there was no reason for Alibaba to be rushed. Facebook and Twitter also started trading well after markets opened, when they made their own respective market debuts in 2012 and 2013.

Alibaba’s valuation is relatively conservative compared to some analysts’ early predictions, but it is still puts the 15-year old company further ahead than any other technology business at the time they made their market debut, and ranks as the largest share sale in American history. Visa’s initial public offering, in 2008, was the previous record holder, after it raised $19.7bn.

Even so, analysts said that Alibaba has undersold itself.

Bankers are understood to have priced the IPO conservatively to help offset the fact that a swathe of inside investors will be able to sell up to $8bn of shares on the day.

Most companies insist on “lock-up” periods which prevent staff from selling their shares for several months after the IPO, in order to protect its share price in the early days. However, Alibaba has taken the unusual step of dispensing with this for an undisclosed number of insiders.

Analysts also speculate that it has priced its IPO at the lower end of expectations to ensure it didn’t repeat the same mistakes as Facebook. The social network, founded by Mark Zuckerberg, went public in May 2012 at $38 a share, but quickly fell below that valuation and took more than a year to recover.

Alibaba’s balance sheet is much healthier than Facebook’s was at the time. The social network had only just moved into profit, but Alibaba has been in the black for years and is still growing rapidly. Inthe last quarter alone, it saw its profits nearly triple to 12.3bn yuan (£1.2bn). Sales jumped 46pc to 15.77bn yuan.

The most bullish analysts argue that Alibaba is worth at least $90 a share, and that its IPO price does not do justice to the company’s “wide moat story” – the fact that it does so many different things.

Founded in Hangzhou by former school teacher Jack Ma, Alibaba operates a string of online marketplaces in China. They include the Amazon-style Tmall, eBay rival Taobao, and Juhuasuan – a discount sales website similar to Groupon. Together the three sites have amassed a huge audience, with 279m active buyers a year.

However, some investors are still wary of Alibaba’s Chinese focus, partly because that makes it heavily dependent on a single economy, and partly because its marketplaces are unfamiliar in their own territories.

The Chinese technology company opted for an American stock exchange partly so that it could preserve its unusual governance structure, which allows 27 “partners”, including Mr Ma, to nominate a majority of the board.

more