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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group has raised $8 billion in its first-ever bond offering, Bloomberg reported on Thursday evening.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group has raised $8 billion in its first-ever bond offering, Bloomberg reported on Thursday evening.

Alibaba received $57 billion in orders for the six-part bond offering, which will be used used to refinance the company’s existing credit facilities. At $8 billion, the sale is the largest dollar denominated offering by a Asian company, according to Bloomberg data, eclipsing a recent $6.5 billion offering from Bank of China .

For Alibaba, the deal underscores U.S. investors’ comfort and interest in the highly profitable and fast growing tech titan, which was founded by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma. Ratings agencies Moody's, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch assigned the equivalent of an A+ rating — A1 at Moody’s — to Alibaba bonds earlier this November.

Those ratings make Alibaba the highest-rated non-state owned Chinese issuer, data provided by Fitch show. The company’s debt ratings are also ahead of tech giants like eBay, Baidu and Amazon.com AMZN, and on par with bellwethers like Oracle and Intel.

Data provider Dealogic said on Thursday Alibaba’s offering was also the largest debut corporate bond issue on record, surpassing the $5 billion in debt Intel raised in September 2011.

In September, Alibaba raised $21.8 billion in its New York Stock Exchange listing, the largest-ever stock offering in the U.S. While Alibaba’s IPO priced at $68 a share, the company’s stock is yet to trade below $80 on public stock markets.

Alibaba closed Thursday trading up 1% at $109.82, putting its market capitalization at over $265 billion, more than the combined stock market value of e-commerce competitors Amazon and eBay.



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