Alibaba may just live up to its hype as the mostly hotly anticipated initial public offering in history.
In a filing Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Chinese ecommerce behemoth reported that profits tripled in the quarter ending June 30th when compared to the same period last year.
The company, which is widely expected to go public next month of the New York Stock Exchange, earned a massive $1.99 billion in the quarter, the filing shows.
Mobile sales are thriving, with revenue in that segment more than doubling from the previous quarter. That's a good sign for Alibaba since there have been concerns that overall revenue, though growing, wasn't expanding at a fast enough clip.
The filing did not contain any new details on how many U.S.-listed shares Alibaba will offer or at what price, but analysts estimate the IPO could blow past Facebook's (FB, Tech30)record $16 billion IPO from May 2012.
Alibaba, an online juggernaut that's been compared to a mix of Amazon (AMZN, Tech30),eBay (EBAY, Tech30), PayPal, and then some, could be worth more than $170 billion. Some estimates are now pushing the $200 billion mark.
Ecommerce is Alibaba's bread and butter. According to the filing, the company continued to increase revenue last quarter from at Taobao and Tmall, its top two e-commerce platforms. which attract more 100 million unique visitors daily.
By one estimate, almost four out of every five dollars spent online in China occur in Alibaba's marketplaces.
But Alibaba is more than its flagship marketplaces -- it also runs a wholesale operation and a cloud computing business. The company is also linked to a hugely popular digital payment service, Alipay. In a first step into finance, Alipay has started to offer investment funds, another avenue with a lot of potential growth. Alibaba even operates a taxi-hailing app.
The firm also recently struck a deal with Lionsgate to stream entertainment in China. In June, Alibaba even bought a local soccer club.
The company isn't as well known in the United States, but it recently launched a new, invitation-only online shopping hub in America called 11Main.com. The IPO will give Alibaba an incredible amount of cash that could be used to expand further in the U.S. or elsewhere.
In China, the company continues to expand its reach, announcing that it bought up theremaining stakes of UCWeb in June to take full control of the Chinese mobile internet software company.
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