国际英语新闻：Visa soars amid market volatility

Shares of Visa Inc., the world's largest retail electronic payment network, soared 28.41 percent on Wednesday amid market volatility.

    On its first day traded on the New York Stock Exchange, Visa, which under the ticker symbol "V", opened at 60.60 U.S. dollars per share, a 37.72 percent surge from its initial public offering (IPO) price of 44 dollars.

    Visa's IPO, which raised 17.86 billion dollars, is the largest domestic initial public offering in United States history and the third largest initial public offering worldwide.

Visa Chairman and CEO Joseph Saunders (C) and Visa CFO Byron Pollitt (R) celebrate with New York Stock Exchange Chairman Marshall Carter during opening bell ceremonies, Wednesday, March 19, 2008. Shares of Visa Inc., the world's largest retail electronic payment network, soared 28.41 percent on Wednesday amid market volatility

    AT&T's 10.6 billion dollars IPO in 2000 had been the U.S. record. Visa's IPO would place second worldwide after Industrial &Commercial Bank of China Ltd's 22 billion dollars IPO in 2006.

    More than half of the proceeds of Visa's record 17.9 billion dollars initial public offering will go to JP Morgan Chase & Co, Bank of America Corp, National City Corp, Citigroup Inc and the other banks that are Visa shareholders.

    Visa will use 3 billion dollars of the IPO proceeds to cover litigation costs, according to regulatory filings, and the balance will be used for general corporate purposes.

    Visa is the world's largest credit card network. It processed 32.7 billion transactions in fiscal 2007 compared with MasterCard Inc's 18.7 billion in processed transactions, according to their regulatory filings.

    Shares of Visa closed up 28.41 percent, or 12.50, at 56.50 dollars, despite a slide in the U.S. stock market.