Alibaba's record IPO brings new investment opportunities in China

(Xinhua) Updated: 2014-09-19 15:51

Kenneth said that the market alone in China with some 1.3 billion population is huge and people will look at it almost as a proxy of the Chinese economy.

"If you believe in what's happening around the world, if you believe in the transition of the Chinese economy to more of a market economy, I think the potential in the future is very

O'Leary said they may sell off some of their holdings in other US internet companies to make a full allocation on Alibaba.

Analysts are confident about Alibaba's growth prospect but remained cautious about potential risks.

"Alibaba has made broad investment in areas like entertainment and media to create an 'Alibaba eco-system,' which will attract more customers. Moreover, Alibaba is also actively exploring international market," Guo said.

According to Liu, there is still a long way for China to catch up with the relatively mature US market in terms of Internet penetration, the number of mobile users and Internet consumption.

Polcari said Alibaba is looking to expand into the Americas and Europe. If things go as it is expecting, certainly the potential is huge.

However, Polcari pointed out the difficulty for Alibaba to expand into territory that its US rival Amazon.com already controls and to win faithful Amazon users to suddenly switch to Alibaba. "So I think it's going to be the competition for sure," Polcari said.

Guo warned of potential concerns after the company's IPO. For example, US investors are not familiar with Alibaba's ownership structure, and there are still fake products on Taobao.com, China's largest consumer-to-consumer online trading site.

Alibaba, founded by Jack Ma in 1999, is one of the largest e-commerce titans in the world. It controls 80 percent of all online retail sales in China.