Alibaba.com, operator of China's largest online trading site for companies, almost tripled on its first day of trading after its initial public offering in Hong Kong, making the stock four times more expensive than Google relative to earnings.

The Chinese company's shares closed yesterday at $5, up from their $1.70 offer price. That gives Hangzhou-based Alibaba a market value of $25.7 billion, which closes in on Yahoo Japan Corp. as Asia's biggest Internet company.

The surge in demand for Chinese shares also made PetroChina the world's first $1 trillion company by some valuations Monday. Alibaba, founded nine years ago by a former English teacher with $60,000, predicts profit will almost triple this year on rising online trades in the world's fastest-growing major economy.

Yahoo owns roughly 40 percent of Alibaba.

"It's a high valuation, but if Alibaba can use its leadership position in the e-commerce market to get more Chinese businesses to pay for its services, it will justify it," said Rafe Xu, an analyst at Sinopac Securities Asia in Shanghai, who plans to initiate coverage of the company. "They have a lot of work to do."

Investors got a chance to buy Alibaba shares in last month's $1.5 billion IPO, the biggest by an Internet company since Google's $1.9 billion IPO in 2004. Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley arranged the Chinese company's sale; demand for orders was about 257 times the amount of stock available.

"The performance of the shares [yesterday] shows our pricing was reasonable," Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma told reporters in Hong Kong yesterday.

Google's stock has jumped more than eightfold since its IPO and now trades at 35 times its estimated earnings, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Yahoo Japan, which operates the nation's most visited Web site, trades at 36 times projected profit.

In the quarter ended June 30, Alibaba accounted for 43 percent of total transactions in the "business-to-business" e-commerce market in China, more than triple its nearest rival, Global Sources, according to estimates by Analysys International.

Clients can advertise or buy products using Alibaba's Web site for free. The company charges suppliers from China and Hong Kong an annual fee to become premium members, which enables them to gain preferential access to buyers.

The company's joint venture in Japan with Softbank, the country's third-biggest cellphone carrier, may start operations "in a couple of months," chief executive David Wei said in an interview yesterday. Yahoo is helping the company to access U.S. users, he said.

China was home to 162 million Internet users at the end of June, second only to the United States, according to the government-backed China Internet Network Information Center. The nation may surpass the United States next year, according to Liu Bin, an Internet analyst at Beijing-based research firm BDA China.