China's E-commerce giant Alibaba started trading its shares Friday on the New York Stock Exchange. Below are 10 things to know about Alibaba, and why its initial public offering made history:-

THE BIGGEST: Alibaba raised $21.8 billion in its launching, making it the biggest U.S. listed IPO in record after the IPO of credit card processing firm Visa in 2008. If Alibaba's investment Banks were to exercise their choice to offer an extra 48 million shares, it could make Alibaba's IPO the greatest worldwide, beating out the $22 billion IPO of Agricultural Bank of China in 2010.

DO N'T FORGET YAHOO: It might have been a big day for Alibaba & its creator Jack Ma, but Yahoo's investors are believing that pretty good after Alibaba's IPO. Yahoo was an early investor in Alibaba, paying $1 billion for a stake in the business in 2005. Yahoo most likely made $8.3 billion to $9.5 billion in Alibaba's IPO, and will certainly still possess a 16 % stake in the business worth $37.7 billion.

ALIBABA ECLIPISES SILICON VALLEY: Alibaba now has a market capitalization of about $219.8 billion, baseding on FactSet. That makes the business bigger than several of the U.S. technology market's most successful names, such as Facebook, ebay.com, or even Amazon.com.

ALL IN ONE: Investors want Alibaba because the company dominates numerous businesses in China that, below in the UNITED STATE, are run by individual companies. Alibaba owns the websites Tmall and also Taobao, which are similar to Amazon.com & ebay, respectively. The company also makes money from transaction fees associated with its different businesses with Alipay, which resembles PayPal. That's merely 3 of Alibaba's lots of subsidiaries.

BIG EARNINGS: Unlike the UNITED STATE E-commerce giant Amazon, Alibaba has actually been regularly profitable. The business had $8.5 billion in sales in its most recent fiscal year ending in March, with earnings of $3.8 billion. The year prior, Alibaba had $5.4 billion in sales and also $1.4 billion in profits. In contrast, Amazon sold $74.4 billion in items in 2013, yet made just $274 million in revenues that year. In 2012, Amazon.com stated a bottom line of $39 million.

RISKS: If Alibaba does well for investors, it will certainly be the exception to just what has been the style for Chinese companies. When Chinese companies have actually noted stocks on American markets, their shares have shed a typical 1% a year for the next 3 years, compared with a typical 7% annual gain for other U.S. IPOs, according to study by Jay Ritter, a finance teacher at the University of Florida.

2ND TIME AROUND: This isn't Alibaba's first time going public. Alibaba took its on-line purchasing portal Alibaba.com public in 2007 in Hong Kong. Alibaba.com was a publicly traded firm just for a couple of years. Alibaba took Alibaba.com private in 2012.

SOLID GOLD: Jack Ma, who started Alibaba in 1999 in his house in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, is now among the richest people worldwide. Ma's possession in the business deserves about $18.2 billion, based upon Alibaba's closing share price Friday. That doesn't consist of the shares he sold in the IPO, which are worth another $867 million, and his various other financial investments. Bloomberg placed his whole net worth at $21.9 billion, making him the 34th wealthiest person in the world.

BIG WIN FOR NYSE: Alibaba opted to note its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, making it the second A-list modern technology company to go public on the Big Board in much less compared to a year. The NYSE handled Twitter's IPO last year. NYSE's competitor, the Nasdaq Securities market, has actually struggled to gain the business of big tech companies considering that Facebook's IPO in 2012, which was pestered with technical troubles.

LIFE IS LIKE A BOX OF ...: Jack Ma's biggest hero is the fictional character Forrest Gump. 'I actually like that professional,' Ma said, in a job interview with business stations CNBC on Friday. 'Every time I'm aggravated, I enjoy the movie. (The movie informs) me that no matter whatever altered, you are you.'