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Alibaba: China, cash and caution - what every investor should know.

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While the Alibaba IPO is still grabbing the business headlines many analysts are trying to assess what the stock will do now, during its first full trading week. R.J. Hottovy, Consumer Equity Strategist at Morningstar Research tries to look ahead and analyses the pros and cons of the world's most talked about stock.
Morningstar research believes in Alibaba, it's what they call a 'wide moat company' with around three hundred million active buyers and more than eight million sellers.
In China, Alibaba is the first place people go if they want to make an online purchase. So, Alibaba is already a profitable business with huge potential. With 32 percent annual expected growth over the next five years, the original IPO price set at 68 USD looks highly undervalued. Morningstar estimates the fair value price to be 90 USD and they were just about right, as was Saxo Bank's Peter Garnry; who also took the view that a fair value for the shares was around 90 USD. No one quite expected the shares to hit that sort of level, almost forty percent above the original IPO price on day one.
But, there's always a but, just how cautious should you be with a Chinese company, where the structure of the board is unique and the company limits the rights of minority shareholders? Many investors are being urged to exercise a certain amount of caution in light of the corporate structure as well as the market landscape in China where market regulation and legal power are at the whim of a one party state.