Technology

10 Reasons to Go Long Alibaba

Published

9 years ago

September 23, 2014

Jeff Desjardins

10 Reasons to Go Long Alibaba

Yesterday, Alibaba announced that underwriters exercised an option to purchase additional shares at the IPO price of $68, bumping the total amount sold from the originally planned $21.8 billion to $25 billion. This makes it the highest IPO in history.

What warrants the company’s impressive valuation? Saxo Bank has pointed out a few things of interest in this infographic that was published just before trading began. For starters, China is still a market that has not reached maturation. Only 36% of GDP is made up of private consumption, and the country is bound to gain 120 million internet users over the next couple of years. Internet penetration is only at 46%, which means there are plenty more consumers to target.

More impressive than the context stats is Alibaba itself. Revenue increased 46% in the last year and the company has an EBITDA margin of 58%. Amazingly, 2% of all of China’s GDP goes through Alibaba.

How’s trading going so far since Alibaba’s debut on the NYSE on Friday? While it finished down on Monday -$4.00 (-4.26%) to $89.89, it is still up 32% over its IPO price of $68/share.

Original graphic from: Trading Floor

Related Topics:china long alibaba e-commerce giant tencent amazon chinese amazon

Up Next

Basic Stock Chart Technical Analysis

Don't Miss

Why Didn’t Apple Use Sapphire Glass in the iPhone 6?

1 Comment

Technology

Charting Grand Theft Auto: GTA’s Budget and Revenues

Dive into the GTA budget through the years, with GTA VI set to be the most expensive video game of all time.

Published

1 day ago

December 5, 2023

Marcus Lu

A cropped chart comparing the GTA budget and revenue across three game titles.

Charting Grand Theft Auto: GTA’s Budget and Revenues

Over 10 years since the launch of Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V), the second most-sold video game in history, Rockstar Games has announced its sequel GTA VI will be “coming 2025.”

As the anticipation only grows for this next big entry in the franchise, we take a look at the GTA budget through the years. How much have the last two games cost to make, how much have they earned, and how do they compare with the latest entry?

Data for this visualization comes from Statista, TweakTown, and Twitch Metrics.

How Much Has GTA VI Cost to Make?

The GTA franchise has grown enormously in scale from humble beginnings as a top-down, 2D video game in 1997. Fifteen installments later, the upcoming release, GTA VI, is estimated to be the most expensive video game to be made yet.

Here’s a look at how much GTA VI and the last two major releases cost, and how much revenue they’ve earned as of August 2023.

Year	Title	Production Costs ($)	Revenue ($)	Copies Sold
2025 (est.)	GTA VI	$2B (rumored)	N/A	N/A
2013	GTA V	$265M	$7.7B	185M
2008	GTA IV	$100M	$2B	25M

In 2008, GTA IV cost around $100 million—already a budget that rivalled big Hollywood releases. However with 25 million copies sold, the game earned nearly $2 billion—a five-fold return on its production cost.

Five years later, GTA V (2013) cost more than $200 million to make—twice GTA IV’s budget. A decade after its release, GTA V has generated close to $8 billion, with hundreds of millions in annual revenue from subscriptions and in-game purchases—a model that its successor is sure to follow.

In fact, subscription fees and in-game purchases represented 78% of Take-Two Interactive’s (parent of GTA developer Rockstar Games) revenues in 2023.

Analysts estimate the to-be-released GTA VI’s costs at $2 billion, including marketing and other expenses. A massive open-world (set in the Miami-inspired “Vice City”), cutting edge graphics, and a reportedly brand-new game engine are all reasons for the game’s outsized budget.

For comparison, the current most expensive games to have been made include Red Dead Redemption 2 (also by Rockstar) and Star Citizen, both reportedly with a $500 million budget.

Meanwhile, Take-Two Interactive shares are up more than 50% for the year.