A giant is about to make its gargantuan presence known on the global market, with the public float of the Chinese tech firm Alibaba.

The company is about to make what analysts expect will be the most valuable tech float in history.

Alibaba sells everything –computer parts and electronics, sunglasses for 1 cent, bulk cyanide, building materials, dentist’s chairs, plants, vending machines, rollercoasters and lizard repellent - are just some of the millions of items Alibaba offers, most of which are sourced directly from the factory and can be ordered in lots of over 10,000 units.

The company has not published its prospectus ahead of its debut on the stock market, and Alibaba's accounts have impressed investors.

The company was started by former English teacher Jack Ma 15 years ago, but has now posted revenue in the final nine months of last year of $6.5 billion.

Alibaba alone handled $250 billion worth of sales in 2013 - more than half the Australian government's tax total income last financial year.

The company has been a huge part of the expanding Chinese economy, allowing international customers an easy way to sell their goods in China, and reciprocally allowing global access to otherwise hard-to-negotiate Chinese markets.

Unlike the recent stock floats of Twitter and Facebook, Alibaba is making a huge amount of money already, leading to speculation that the initial offering figure will be well beyond the billions paid for the social media platforms.

“You see a company that has a fundamentally sound balance sheet and one that is benefitting perhaps off the most spectacular rise of e-commerce that we've seen since the arrival of the internet,” Laurie Pearcey, director of the Confucius Institute at University of New South Wales, told the ABC.

“I mean, if you look at everything that plagued the dot com sector at the turn of the millennium and you look at all of those issues which were really confronting companies and forcing some major restructures taking place in companies all across the tech landscape, Alibaba really is entering this listing in very positive territory.”

There is only speculation as to the eventual price that Alibaba may demand, but several estimates put the figure between $100 and $200 billion.