Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s shares in Hong Kong have been made available to Chinese mainland investors for the first time since Tuesday, which could usher a fortune from the mainland into the city’s flagging stock market.

The addition to the stock connect programs, which links the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges to the Hong Kong bourse, is forecast to attract as much as $12 billion from southbound trading in six months, according to a Morgan Stanley forecast.

The cross-border programs are accessible to mainland investors with at least 500,000 yuan ($70,221) of assets in their stock accounts. While the Shanghai-Hong Kong link was launched in 2014, the link connecting Shenzhen and Hong Kong was established in 2016.

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By the end of this year, the move could draw around $2 billion to $3 billion of mainland liquidity, Goldman Sachs said.

“The inclusion of Alibaba in the Stock Connect program is appealing for the fact that it allows mainland investors to invest in the firm for the very first time,” said Chelsey Tam, senior equity analyst at investment research firm Morningstar.  

Tam said Alibaba will become a darling for those mainland investors who favor a higher level of transparency, dividends, share buybacks, and investor communication.

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What is also music to the ears is that China's market regulator in late August announced that Alibaba had finished a three-year “rectification” process after being fined for monopolistic practices in 2021, since when the company’s Hong Kong-listed shares have tanked by over 60 percent.

The Stock Connect inclusion sent Alibaba’s stock prices more than 4 percent higher to end at HK$81.6 on Tuesday.

The Hangzhou, Zhejiang province-based company is a latecomer to the Stock Connect when compared with its mainland peers like internet bellwether Tencent and delivery giant Meituan, as it was a secondary listing in Hong Kong before. In August, Alibaba upgraded its Hong Kong listing to primary status — a move that finally allowed it to be added to the cross-border trading program.

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With dual primary listings at both the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange now, the tech behemoth first revealed the upgraded plan in 2022 amid an audit wrangle between Chinese firms and the United States.

Unlike its secondary listing in Hong Kong since 2019, whereby the stock issuer could be exempted from full compliance with the Asian hub’s listing rules, the dual primary listing this time requires Alibaba to meet the full reporting rules of both marketplaces.

The potential money inflow into Alibaba dovetails with mainland investors' growing appetite for the Hong Kong market. According to the city’s stock index compiler Hang Seng Indexes Company, southbound trading via Stock Connect contributed to 14.3 percent of the market turnover in 2023, up 2.6 percentage points year-on-year.