A brick-and-mortar electric appliance store of China's e-commerce giant JD.com Inc (JD) opens on Monday in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality. Thousands of local consumers rushed to take a look. Covering an area of 50,000 square meters, the store is JD's first in the world based on borderless retail. Photo: VCG

The Hong Kong stock market has ushered in its biggest IPO of the year as China's second-largest e-commerce company JD.com went public on Thursday, a secondary listing for the tech giant after its NASDAQ IPO in 2014. 

On Thursday morning, shares of JD.com surged by more than 7 percent in premarket trading and stood at HK$239 per share ($30.80), up 5.75 percent, at opening time. By close of morning session, its shares had risen 3.81 percent to HK$234.60. 

The Chinese company raised HK$29.77 billion at HK$226 per share for the listing, kicking off the largest IPO thus far in 2020 and likely the whole year. About 396,000 investors have sought to purchase the company's shares, and JD.com's IPO was oversubscribed 178 times.

In comparison, Alibaba, JD.com's biggest rival in China, raised funds of HK$101.2 billion when it listed on the Hong Kong bourse last year, but its number of subscribers was smaller than JD.com's buyers, according to media reports. 

Behind the fundraising gap between the two companies are their differences in company size and business scale, as Alibaba has evolved into a multi-sector ecosystem while JD.com still focuses on its core e-commerce sector, said Dong Dengxin, director of the Finance and Securities Institute at the Wuhan University of Science and Technology.

However, JD.com's improving business performance reveals a promising future for the company, giving investors more confidence in the e-commerce giant, Dong said. 

The company saw revenues grow 20.7 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2020 despite negative impact from the nationwide coronavirus outbreak. Its sales during the May Day holiday in the first week of May increased by about 45 percent. 

JD.com chose to go public on the Hong Kong bourse on Thursday, the same day as the 6/18 online shopping festival it established alongside Alibaba's Double 11 shopping spree.  

Dong said listings of large-scale mainland companies like Alibaba and JD.com are gradually creating a "clustering effect" on the Hong Kong stock market which will enhance its global influence. 

"These companies' values have been downplayed in the US, but the Hong Kong market understands the power of the Chinese mainland market," Dong said.