The IPO of Alibaba, the large Chinese e-commerce site, may show that the China stock markets are topping. The company appears to have raised $1.5 billion for about 17% of the company. This is good news for Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO), which invested a billion dollars in the site, but it could also make the US portal look bad. If the China market moves down before Yahoo! can off-load some of those shares, its initial investment in the company may not look like a coup.
The astonishing thing about the Alibaba IPO is that, according to The New York Times, "the I.P.O. price translates to a multiple of 55 times its forecast 2008 earnings." The number serves to point out the fact that, even with its economy growing at 10% a year, sustaining P/Es at this level will become impossible, as it did in the Japanese markets and US internet stocks in late 1990s. Both of those bubbles led to corrections of more than 50%.
The Shanghai Composite Index is now up well over 200% this year. The bull argument for an ongoing increase is that the emerging China middle class needs a place to invest its money and cannot move that capital into overseas equities. That makes the market overly dependent on one set of buyers.
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