MOST mainland investors can still only watch gains in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., as China’s most valuable technology company jumped in its first trading day in Hong Kong on Tuesday.

Fund mangers on the mainland say the shares will be a must-have once they are included into Hong Kong’s trading links with the mainland, the timing of which remains uncertain.

The industry is unfazed that the company’s U.S.-listed equity has nearly tripled in price since the firm’s September 2014’s initial public offering, predicting that Chinese investors’ familiarity with the e-commerce firm will push Alibaba’s market valuation higher still.

“It’s a unique and rare asset — like Tencent and Meituan — that can’t be found in mainland-listed stocks,” said Qu Shaohua, managing director at Acroguardian Investment Co. “Though we don’t own Alibaba shares yet, I think it’s important that we do once it becomes available through the stock connect — at the right price.”

The stock is eligible to join the Hang Seng Composite Index, of which many components can be traded through the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges’ trading links with Hong Kong’s.

But due to Alibaba’s unequal voting rights structure, its shares must trade for some seven months in Hong Kong and meet other requirements in areas like trading volume before being included into the stock connect.

Jiang Liangqing, a fund manager at Ruisen Capital Management in Beijing, has Alibaba high on his shopping list and expects other institutional investors to add the stock as an “essential part” of their portfolio, just like they did with Tencent Holdings Ltd. when its shares traded in the city became accessible to mainland investors a few years back.

Alibaba rose 6.6 percent from its issuance price to close at HK$187.6 (US$23.96) Tuesday. That is slightly higher than the Monday close of the firm’s U.S.-listed shares, which were at around 25 times projected earnings for the next 12 months, versus Tencent’s 26 times and Meituan Dianping’s 117 times.

The company is not totally strange to Hong Kong’s stock market. Business-to-business marketplace Alibaba.com Ltd. was floated there in 2007, but Alibaba bought back the shares five years later at the IPO price.

The parent company then went public in New York in 2014 after being turned down by Hong Kong. It has created more than US$250 billion in wealth for investors since its IPO.

(SD-Agencies)