“Every time I’m frustrated, I watch the movie,” he said from the floor of NYSE. “I watched the movie again before I came here. It’s telling me, ‘no matter whatever changes, you are you.’” He recalled how he had once earned just a few dollars a day as a teacher in Hangzhou. He is now the richest man in China.
Mr Ma stake in Alibaba is now worth more than $17bn, but he is not the only beneficiary of the historic flotation. Yahoo, the American technology giant, took $9.7bn off the table by selling part of the stake it acquired in Chinese company for $1bn in 2005. It still retains around 16pc of Alibaba’s shares, worth more than $11bn.
Britain’s biggest medical charity, the Wellcome Trust, also made more than GBP100m from selling a stake in Alibaba.
Others held on to their stakes in the hope that Alibaba’s biggest gains are yet to come.
Founded in Hangzhou, the company operates a string of online marketplaces in China, including 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. They are also hugely growing fast. Alibaba’s profits nearly tripled to 12.3bn yuan (£1.2bn) and sales jumped 46pc to 15.77bn yuan in the last quarter alone.
The most bullish analysts argued that Alibaba sold itself short by pricing its shares as low as $68. However, the company was prepared to miss out on some potential upside in order to ensure that trading got off to a strong start.
Many potential investors are still smarting from heavy losses in Facebook’s IPO. The social network priced its shares at $38 when it made its initial public offering in May 2012, and opened at $42.05 on its first day of trading. However, it sunk back to close just above its IPO price, and continued to shed value for several weeks afterwards. In the end, the technology business took more than a year to recover to its flotation value. Its market capitalisation has nearly doubled since then to around $200bn.
Coca-Cola is worth just shy of $184bn.
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