Chinese Twitter clone Weibo makes $285.6M in its U.S. IPO, shares up 19%

Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like service under Chinese online media company Sina, went public on the Nasdaq Capital Market this week under the ticker symbol of “WB.”

The company filed for this long-rumored IPO in March 2014.

The company will issue 16.8 million American depository shares at the bottom of its planned range of $17 each to raise $285.6 million of capital. The company had planned to sell 20 million shares at between $17 and $19 per share.

At the time of this writing, shares are trading at $20.24, up by around 19 percent.

Sina held a 77.6 percent stake in Weibo before the IPO. Another big shareholder of the microblog service is Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, which invested $586 million for an 18 percent stake in Weibo one year earlier.

Alibaba, which is also preparing for a U.S. IPO, now holds a 19.3 percent stake in Weibo and it has filed to increase its shares to 32 percent in March, while Sina’s stake is expected to reduce to 56.9 percent.

According to the prospectus, $250 million of the funds raised in the IPO will be used to pay back the loans from Sina, while rest of the capital will be injected in technology and R&D.

This story originally appeared on TechNode. Copyright 2014