Chinese ecommerce company Alibaba.com is looking to raise HK$10.3 billion ($1.3 billion) from its IPO according to documents released to potential investors today.
Alibaba.com Ltd. and Alibaba.com Corp. will sell a combined 858.9 million shares (17%) in Alibaba.com at HK$10 to HK$12 apiece, with Yahoo, currently a 40% share holder in the Alibaba Group buying HK$776 million of the IPO shares, resulting in 8.2% ownership of Alibaba.com Ltd, the newly listed IPO entity.
As we reported in July, the IPO will see the partial spin-off of Alibaba.com from the Alibaba Group, the China based holding company that owns sites including Alipay, Taabao.com and Yahoo China.
The IPO will value Alibaba.com at up to $7.8 billion.
As Bloomberg reports, the Hong Kong IPO is likely to encourage other China based companies to consider listing locally as opposed to the NASDAQ only, where many leading Chinese ecommerce ventures are currently listed.
In related news, Baidu’s market cap has now passed $10 billion, up from $7.97 billion September 17. At close of trade 15 October Baidu stocks closed at $314.95 for a market cap of $10.69 billion, nearly double the market cap the company had in August.
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A Chinese e-commerce company whose logo looks like a laid back Easter Island head issuing an IPO and trying to raise a billion dollars.
Okay then.
Doesn’t Y! own some portion of Alibaba? Will this have any kind of measurable positive impact on Y!?
what does it have to do with high tech news?
bp
trading tennis blog
That just demonstrates how little the audience knows about what goes on in the Asian part of the world, in some of these comments there is a great deal of scepticism that this IPO will succeed. Alibaba is reported to be extremely profitable.
It will succeed, there are already several tech companies listed in HK. Tencent for instance has a market cap that’s over US 13 billion.
Alibaba.com sort of brings the offline world online by maintaining a presence at trade fairs/conventions (such as the Canton Fair going on right now), verifying company information, and putting it all online. I know a few business people in China that do pretty well from their Alibaba.com Gold memberships. But there is a lot of spam and a lot of scammers. I am not sure what direction they will go after the IPO. I don’t think Alibaba.com will get into general search. Yahoo! China is already in that market. Taobao.com is in the B2C market. (These are Alibaba group companies.)
yes, i second Hana’s omment. Correction on Duncan’s post, it is not taabao.com, but taobao.com
Has anyone travel to Maccau, Shanghai, Qingdao, Hong Kong, Shanghai?
50 years ago… City was like dumper.
Now, you see massive transformation, super skyscrapers, and middle class familes. It’s funny…… U.S tried to stop chinese american entrepenurers from going back to homeland. This November - July 08…. I bet you half of chinese will fly back to china start company in there.
Traveling back to maccau. You see this… New and super large Las Vagas:
http://images.google.com/image.....rch+Images
the yahoo details are in the post, yahoo maintains 40% of alibaba group and takes a stake in alibaba.com
I like to ask chinese… why go home?
You got yao ming here. You got rush hour 3 movie.
If more U.S. chinese familes fly back to china. Awwww….
You will see
less asian ladies..
less asian marriage…
less asian pornstars…
less chinatown…
less chinese goods and supplies…
less economy…
But good news it. you will see chinese people on TV. Beijing games.
Be happy!!!
I wasn’t actually being skeptical, I just thought paraphrasing the story a certain way would sound funny.
That is a silly logo.
This is just a sign of things to come with Chinese websites. Just look at the traffic statistics of Baidu. Enormous.
The only problem with alibaba.com is many of the manufacturers using it have questionable quality issues. Making contacts there can be very hit and miss.
My favourite small Chinese website http://www.dragonlasers.com
Alibaba is the future of trade. Why calling around a bunch of unknown un-understandable sales reps in Guangzhou when you can just press “enter’ in your laptop?
One day its market cap will pass $100Bn, and it will make Softbank’s Masa Son the richest man in the world again
Pretty cool site, but not worth the market cap IMO.
rc (#3)
Alibaba owns Yahoo China and operates in what soon will be the biggest online market in the world: that makes it “high tech” news. Sorry that I didn’t spell the relationship out (nor explain Baidu) but both companies are big operators that we’ve covered before, hence I didn’t feel the need to explain either of them again.
I think that Alibaba is going much stronger and eBay may face tough competition at least in China market and few Asian countries.
@No. 15 “eBay may face tough competition at least in China”? eBay is more or less dead in China already, compared to Alibaba’s alternative, Taobao!
yeah alibaba do work really hard at the offline aspects of what they do - big presence at tradeshows etc. i’ve never been able to successfully sort through the mess to get to a decent supplier, but i’ve heard its very worth it if you have the time (or are buying the volume to make it worthwhile).
I can only agree with NicolasV .
We just launched our own directories platform http://industrialsDirectory.com
We are still in beta but feedbacks and requests tend to confirm there’s still room for this kind of services.
Early investors welcomed.
I think China is the wildcard in almost every company’s forecast. I would predict that Blackberry would lose value, except that they are expanding to China. China is a huge, actively growing, mostly untapped market.
Ebay is still very successful in the US, but they brought their poor customer service, arbitrary rules, and American style payment system to China and failed. There were so many billboards and advertisements in public transportation facilities throughout China - but it didn’t help. That hurt them more than their acquisition of Skype.
Baidu has the first-mover advantage in China, since Google.com wasn’t based in China until after Baidu.com captured most internet users. I’m really curious how Google’s mobile platform will do in China.
I am still puzzled about how Alibaba.com is going to grow, since they are strictly a B2B company and business in China is still in great portion about Guanxi, relationships. Companies like Walmart don’t need Alibaba.com. I guess it’s more for small to medium size companies. Alibaba.com is not going to get into search, B2C or C2C payment systems, since other Alibaba group companies have those covered. IPOs in Hong Kong have done pretty well lately, but $1.3 billion based on $7.8 billion might be a bit too high. I would rather invest in Taobao + Alipay.
I just did a posting on the high valuation of Alibaba with many numbers. At the current price, Alibaba is valued at 4 to 5 times the value of the market in which it operates!
http://www.thomascrampton.com/.....-too-high/
There can be no doubt about it: Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma is an extremely savvy businessman, and he deserves a web celebrity status for having created, and managed, Alibaba. Jack Ma was an English teacher before he started Alibaba on a shoe string in 1999. Now his firm, which employs more than 4000 people, is going public, and will raise US-$ 1,5 billion in what many call the most successful IPO in the history of the Hong Kong stock market.
Reports from Hong Kong indicate that the transaction is going to be a very profitable deal for both Mr. Ma and the new shareholders, some 80% of them corporate investors such as the US web giant Yahoo!, Cisco Systems, and AIG Global Investments. Yahoo!’s shares have already surged spectacularly.
This is all very exciting financial stuff… BUT - the new Alibaba stockholders and the general public should also know this:
Alibaba is not only China’s biggest e-commerce firm but also the world’s largest online shark fin trader. While environmentalists, ocean lovers and a growing world-wide scuba diving community find this utterly scandalous, Yahoo! top managers don’t seem to mind. They already have a US-$ 1 billion stake in Alibaba representing a 40% shareholding, and, as reported, will soon increase their investment in the Chinese internet company by another 8-10%.
Activist groups, thousands of petitioning individuals from all over the world, media organizations have approached both Alibaba and Yahoo! to induce them to drop the shark fin trade. Nothing convinced these hard-boiled business people that they ought to adopt a responsible corporate attitude toward environmental matters.
While the Alibaba executives non-chalantly stated that they do not wish to “take sides” in the ongoing “controversy”, Yahoo! sheepeishly claimed that they are not in a position to interfere with the business policies of corporations in which they don’t have a majority shareholding. Yeah, right….
The fact of the matter is that both firms do not want to end the highly lucrative trade of shark fins. They blatantly ignore the well-founded conclusion of internationally renowned marine experts that the indiscriminate mass killing of sharks mostly for their fins, well over 100.000.000 animals per year, is driving many species into extinction with catastrophic consequences for the biodiversity of the world’s oceans.
The practice of “finning” sharks is a most cruel way to cut off the fins from live sharks, and then to dump the hapless creatures back to the sea where they face a slow and painful death.
By offering international shark fin dealers a convenient platform to do business Alibaba / Yahoo! are fueling the often illegal finning of sharks and, thus, actively and recklessly contribute to an environmental crime they are very well aware of.
Here is an article that was published by Business Week recently:
http://www.businessweek.com/gl.....756191.htm
And by clicking this link you will find a passionate letter from Captain Paul Watson, CEO of the Sea Shepherd Society, to Susan Decker, President of Yahoo!:
http://www.seashepherd.org/new.....ticle.html
The international pressure on Alibaba to stop trading shark fins will increase. Soon, Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Ms. Decker of Yahoo! will have to realize that the firm’s active involvement in this highly unsavory business which is partially controlled by brutal Mafia-type organizations will severely damage its reputation, not only in the United States and Europe but wherever they have educated clients who care about the health of this blue planet.
While too many Chinese seem to find nothing wrong with killing sharks for a tasteless soup of no other value than some dubious social prestige for those who consume it, the enlightened citizens of the world will staunchly oppose the ruthless extermination of animals that have been around long before God even dreamt of creating Adam and Eve….