NEW YORK, Sept. 19 -- China's legendary e-commerce giant Alibaba Group created a China miracle on Friday, as its stocks surged 38 percent on their first trading day after a record-breaking initial public offering (IPO) at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

Closing at 93.89 dollars per share, the Alibaba stocks jumped 38 percent from the IPO price of 68 dollars, valuing the company at over 230 billion dollars, compared with a market capital of 150 billion dollars owned by its American rival Amazon.

The NYSE trading floor rocked when Jack Ma, executive chairman and lead founder of the Alibaba Group, arrived there, as people thronged to witness how an American dream story was written by a former English teacher from China's eastern city of Hangzhou.

With a tremendous demand for orders, the Alibaba shares started trading on the open market at 92.70 dollars a share nearly two and a half hours after the market opened.

"It's not a surprise to me. It opens at 92.70 dollars on 48 million shares, which dwarfed the Twitter opening. It probably may hit resistance at 100 dollars," Partner/Designated Market Maker at J. Streicher & Co. Mark Otto told Xinhua.

Alibaba started its global roadshow two weeks ago in New York and reportedly received enough bookings for the offering within five days thanks to massive interest from worldwide investors.

At an IPO price of 68 dollars per share, Alibaba shattered the record for the largest IPO in history, raising a total amount of 25 billion dollars, surpassing the 22.1 billion dollars raised by the Agricultural Bank of China in 2010.

About 15 years ago, Ma failed to raise just 2 million dollars in Silicon Valley, as few could foresee his company's bright future.

A SUCCESS STORY BORN IN CHINA'S OPEN INTERNET AGE

Alibaba was founded by Ma in his apartment in 1999. It has now grown into one of the largest e-commerce titans in the world, controlling 80 percent of all online retail sales in China.

According to its regulatory filing, Alibaba's profit was 1.99 billion dollars in the quarter ending on June 30, almost tripling that of the same period a year ago, while its quarterly revenue surged 46 percent to 2.54 billion dollars.

Alibaba's business took off with China's fast growing consumer demand and the untapped potential of the Internet, which have particularly boosted online shopping in the country. It's also a major reason why lots of investors are drawn to the growth of China's e-commerce sector now.

"It really is the intersection of two very important trends: the first is the power of the Internet and the second is the growth of Chinese economy. Companies that can exploit that intersection have much higher growth prospect than the average," said Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx Group.

Alibaba's business model is considered as a mixture of Amazon and eBay. In 2013 alone, the company handled 250 billion dollars worth of merchandise, more than Amazon and eBay combined.

Alibaba's major platforms include Taobao, China's largest shopping site, and Tmall, where brands sell directly to consumers. It has also created a Paypal-like payment system Alipay to ensure transaction safety between buyers and sellers.

The company's success has made Ma a legendary Chinese entrepreneur. But to many people's surprise, he told the media on Friday that Forrest Gump is his hero as the movie has given him passion and courage.

"I watched the movie before I came here again to New York. The movie told me again that whatever changed, you are you. I'm still the guy 15 years ago when I only earned 20 dollars a month," Ma said.

Commenting on Alibaba's successful IPO, Kenneth Polcari, director of NYSE Floor Operations at O'Neil Securities Inc. said it's "certainly a great day for the Chinese in general that they can come here to the United States, to an iconic place like the New York Stock Exchange and participate in this capitalization market, capitalization process."

GROWING INTEREST TO INVEST IN CHINA

Since three Chinese star tech companies -- Sina Corporation, NetEase, Inc. and Sohu.com Inc. -- all went public in the United States in 2000, more and more Chinese Internet and innovative companies have come to the American capital market for financing.

In the following years, Chinese companies' IPOs saw peaks in the late 2010s and also bottoms in 2011 to 2012, but global investors' appetite to invest in China have grown over the years.

In May, another Chinese online retailer JD.com Inc. raised 1.78 billion dollars in an IPO in May, the largest IPO conducted by a Chinese company at the time.

Alibaba's IPO even overshadowed U.S. tech giant Apple Inc. It is unusual to see that Apple's shares fell on its new product debut day, and analysts suspect Alibaba stole the limelight.

Investors are confident about Alibaba's growth prospects but some remain cautious about potential risks, including its ownership structure, regulatory issues that may confuse international investors, as well as product quality and issues related to intellectual property rights.

"We have a dream. We hope that in the next 15 years, the world will change because of us," said Ma, promising to work hard to take care of investors and make shareholders happy.

"Today what we got is not money but the trust from the people, millions of small businesses," he said.