Alibaba Group the Asian e-commerce giant shot out of the starting gate with shares opening in New York at US$92.7 each.
That's a significant premium to the US$68 issue price set and electrified the trading floor at the New York Exchange.
It puts the market cap of the firm at around US230bn and gives the value of Jack Ma's personal holding at over US$20bn
Yesterday the much talked about IPO earned the accolade of biggest US stock market flotation ever.
The group is set to sell US$21.8bn of shares at a price of US$68 each when it floated. The flotation price valued the entire company at US$168bn.
The listing is slightly controversial because of the company's dual share structure that allows the owners to keep control of the company despite not controlling a majority of the shares in issue.
An insistence on maintaining the share structure proved a sticking point in the company's plans to float in Hong Kong hence the listing in New York.
Unlike many other high profile tech companies that have floated in the US this decade Alibaba will make its debut on the stock market as a company that is already profitable.
The flotation has provided a windfall for waning Internet portal Yahoo! which invested US$1bn in Alibaba some nine years ago and which is thought to have cashed in 121.7mln shares through the flotation raising around US$8.3bn in the process.
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