(Yicai Global) Nov. 18 -- Kingsoft Office Software, a developer of popular office software, today saw its stock more than triple in value on its first day of trading on Shanghai's Nasdaq-style Star market.

The high valuation was reasonable given the company's large and loyal client base, a Shenzhen-based private equity investor told Yicai Global. But whether the firm can support such a high valuation depends on its future performance, he added.

Kingsoft shares [SHA:688111] reached a high of CNY145.51 (USD21) each today, a more than three-fold gain over its offering price of CNY45.86, and closed at CNY126.35. The firm's price-earnings ratio surged over four times.

The Beijing-based company sells the Writer, Presentation and Spreadsheets Office software suite and other office products for use on Microsoft Windows, MacOS, Linux and Android operation systems. It develops various value-added office services, provides one-stop, multi-platform office application solutions and advertises online through its products.

"When I was in high school, my first personal computer was an Intel 486," an investor told Yicai Global. "It could not run much software... but I was deeply impressed by WPS."

While the Intel 486 computer was consigned to history decades ago, Kingsoft's WPS is still around and popular.

China is offering support for innovation and domestic substitution in the fields of servers, chips, semiconductors and even innovative medicines, which gives Kingsoft a great outlook, the investor said.

Kingsoft already counts China's five major state-owned commercial banks and 11 of the country's 12 joint-stock commercial banks as clients. It is likely to have more and more domestic customers over the next two years and the potential is very large, he said.

The number of monthly active users of Kingsoft office products exceeded 300 million at the end of last year, some 120 million of which were users of the WPS Office desktop version.

But Kingsoft still lags someway behind American software giant Microsoft, the firm's biggest competitor in China. Microsoft's operating income was USD125.8 billion as of June 30, up 14 percent year on year. Profit was up 23 percent to USD42.96 billion, according to the Redmond, Washington-based firm's first-half financial report.

Kingsoft's revenue was CNY685 million (USD97.6 million) in the first half, up 38.4 percent from a year earlier. Net profit was CNY147 million, down 19.4 percent.