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The Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group filed paperwork on Tuesday in the United States to sell stock to the public for the first time, in an embrace of the global capital markets that represents a coming-of-age for China’s booming Internet industry.

“Alibaba is the fastest-growing Internet company in one of the fastest-growing economies in the world,” said Sameet Sinha, an analyst with B. Riley & Company, a boutique investment bank in Los Angeles. “They are like an Amazon, an eBay and a PayPal.”

In the filing, Alibaba said it intended to raise $1 billion in an initial public offering — a figure used to calculate its registration fee. But the company is expected ultimately to raise $15 billion to $20 billion, which would make it the biggest American I.P.O. since Facebook’s $16 billion offering in May 2012.

When it makes its debut on the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq market, Alibaba is also expected to have a share price that could value the company at roughly $200 billion — more than the market value of Facebook, Amazon.com or eBay, although still trailing that of Google or Apple.

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The immense size of the offering means that Alibaba shares will probably find a home in a broad swath of mutual funds and pension funds — and thus indirectly in the portfolios of small investors around the world.

Wall Street has been eagerly awaiting the Alibaba I.P.O., seeing it as perhaps the best chance yet to buy into China’s growth. Online shopping there is expected to grow at an annual rate of 27 percent, according to the iResearch Consulting Group, and Alibaba is the leader in that area.

Yet the offering will also divulge a company that is relatively unknown in the West and whose complex web of businesses and dealings may put off potential shareholders. Alibaba warned prospective investors that Chinese laws and regulations are difficult to understand and predict. In addition, the prospectus says that Alibaba’s management and major shareholders will control the board, giving ordinary shareholders no power over the direction of the company.

In China, Alibaba’s brands are household names. It operates an online shopping center, Tmall, where global companies like Walt Disney, Apple, L’Oréal, Nike and Procter & Gamble have set up virtual storefronts to sell products directly to Chinese shoppers. Another of its sites, Taobao, is aimed largely at small Chinese firms that want to sell items to Chinese consumers.

The company’s digital payment affiliate, Alipay, not only handles transactions on its sites, but is also widely used as a mobile payment system on cellphones in China, much as credit cards are used in other countries. It handled $519 billion worth of payments last year.

Last year, the value of all merchandise sold on Alibaba exceeded $248 billion, more than the volume on eBay and Amazon combined. In the last three months of last year, nearly 20 percent of the purchases on Alibaba were made through mobile phones.

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American companies like Google and eBay can only dream of making the kind of profit margin that Alibaba enjoys. In the 2013 calendar year, Alibaba had net income of $3.56 billion on revenue of $7.95 billion. That translates into a profit margin of roughly 45 percent. In comparison, eBay mustered a 17.8 percent margin.

Alibaba has much higher profit margins than American Internet companies, analysts say, because its costs are low. It doesn’t own the merchandise sold on its sites, making money instead from the merchants that pay a commission for access or that buy ads to promote themselves. Alibaba also enjoys a low tax rate of about 10 percent.

Alibaba is one of China’s top three Internet players, along with the search engine company Baidu and the media and gaming conglomerate Tencent, but is bigger and more profitable than those rivals.

Some investors have resorted to indirect routes to get a piece of Alibaba, like buying stock in Yahoo and SoftBank of Japan. SoftBank, the Japanese telecommunications giant, is Alibaba’s biggest investor with a 34.4 percent stake. Yahoo is next, with 22.6 percent.

Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder, is the biggest individual shareholder, owning 8.9 percent of the stock; he is followed by his longtime lieutenant, Joseph C. Tsai, who owns 3.6 percent.

When Yahoo first bought a 40 percent stake in 2005, it valued Alibaba at just $2.5 billion. Six years later, when a consortium of investors took another stake, the company was valued at about $32 billion. Now, analysts estimate that Alibaba may be worth anywhere from $130 billion to $235 billion.

Many details of the offering, such as the share price and the number of shares to be sold, have not yet been set. Shares are not expected to begin publicly trading for several months, as the Securities and Exchange Commission reviews Alibaba’s offering materials.

That time frame increases the risk that investors may be less willing to take a chance on an expensive Internet stock. Technology stocks have fallen sharply in the last few weeks after an impressive run, with some analysts saying that they are overvalued. The market’s appetite for I.P.O.s has also cooled.

Alibaba amassed its multibillion-dollar fortune a little at a time, shrewdly capitalizing on two trends — the rise of the Internet and China’s growing prosperity.

The company does some business overseas in markets like Russia and Brazil, and has invested in several American companies. It is also building an American online marketplace called 11 Main.

But in its prospectus, Alibaba emphasized that it planned to concentrate on the Chinese market, one whose potential it believes has not been fully tapped. It cited statistics showing that only about 45.8 percent of the country’s population uses the Internet, significantly lower than in the United States and Japan. And only about 49 percent of customers in the country shopped online.

Yahoo, which currently owns about 22.6 percent of Alibaba on a fully diluted basis, is set to sell 208 million shares in the offering, leaving it with a roughly 13.6 percent stake. Other big shareholders, like SoftBank, the American private equity firm Silver Lake Partners and the Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, are considered unlikely to sell much stock.

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The company was set up in 1999 by Mr. Ma, then a 34-year-old former English teacher, and 17 others who worked out of Mr. Ma’s modest apartment in the eastern city of Hangzhou. Visitors to Alibaba’s headquarters at the time recall being able to estimate the number of employees by counting the toothbrushes jammed into mugs in Mr. Ma’s bathroom.

The company’s first venture was Alibaba.com, a site designed to connect foreign buyers with Chinese manufacturers. The site was started just months before China joined the World Trade Organization. It eventually became a beneficiary and contributor to the explosive growth in Chinese exports in the ensuing years.

In 2003, Alibaba opened its second main business, Taobao.com, a retail site where individuals and small businesses can buy and sell goods throughout greater China. It was a direct play on Chinese consumption that arrived just as a substantial middle class was emerging in the country’s wealthy coastal metropolises.

In 2008, Alibaba doubled down on its bet on the Chinese consumer with Tmall.com, a retail site where both local and international brands could set up virtual stores to market products directly to Chinese shoppers. With Tmall, Alibaba takes a cut of the transaction value, tying its profit directly to retail sales volumes.

Alibaba is by far the leader in the Chinese e-commerce market, which handled transactions worth 9.9 trillion renminbi, or $1.6 trillion, last year, according to iResearch.

The company’s growth has not been without setbacks. Claims of fraud and poor quality products have dogged its various sites, and its partnership with Yahoo has been rocky at times. Its instant messaging service, Laiwang, has struggled to gain ground against the WeChat service from Tencent, a powerhouse on mobile phones.

Still, Alibaba keeps entering new businesses, from mobile phone service and banking to cloud computing and logistics.

“It’s becoming a conglomerate,” said Mr. Sinha, the American analyst. “It is going into all aspects of the Internet.”