THE BUZZ

Alibaba Group is positioned to be the largest IPO ever, and to hear Joseph Tsai, executive vice chairman, talk about the Chinese Internet giant, it’s just the beginning.

“We are only at the start of our journey, with many growth opportunities ahead of us,” he said in a Web video presentation promoting the initial public offering to investors. “We have a large market opportunity in China that we can build to a massive scale.”

Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) is already massive in many ways.

Its IPO is now expected to raise more than $21.45 billion, as the company on Monday raised its IPO price to a range of 66-68 per share, from 60-66.

If Alibaba fully exercises its overallotment of shares, it will become the largest IPO of all time, surpassing Agricultural Bank of China’s $22.1 billion listing in 2010, says IPO research firm Ipreo.

Even without the overallotment, the IPO will surpass the largest U.S. IPO, Visa (NYSE:V), and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), the top tech IPO.

Alibaba is China’s largest provider of e-commerce services by a huge margin. For the 12-month period ended June 30, it processed $296 billion in gross merchandise volume — more than Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) combined.

A majority of total online GMV — the value of confirmed orders of products and services — in China occurs on three Alibaba websites that collectively have more than 279 million active buyers and 8.5 million sellers, the company reported in its IPO prospectus.

“Alibaba is the best-positioned company in the e-commerce space in China by far,” said Henry Guo, research analyst at JG Capital. “It has the brand name, market awareness and a dominant market share, with all the supporting components in place, to further drive growth,” he said.

Alibaba plans to sell 320 million shares.

Strong demand for shares among institutional investors is expected to push the price higher.

BUSINESS

The company consists of nine business units, with operations across 290 subsidiaries. The bulk of revenue comes from its three primary e-commerce sites:

• Taobao.com, China’s top consumer-to-consumer online marketplace and a rough equivalent to eBay.

• Tmall.com, a business-to-consumer marketplace.

• Juhuasuan, where consumer groups can buy products at discounted prices by aggregating demand.

These three accounted for 81.6% of revenue for the 12-month period ended in June.

Alibaba gets most of its revenue from fees it charges customers to use the platforms. The company also operates Alibaba.com and 1688.com, which are wholesale marketplaces.