Chinese E-Commerce Company Said to Plan Public Offering – David Barboza
From The New York Times:
Alibaba.com, China’s leading e-commerce company, is planning to go public later this year in what could be the biggest initial public offering ever for a Chinese Internet company, according to people briefed on the deal.Alibaba.com, which is controlled by the Alibaba Group and partly owned by Yahoo, could raise $1 billion, making the stock offering bigger than those of other high-flying Chinese Internet companies in recent years, including Baidu.com, the Chinese Internet search engine, and Tencent.com, which runs the popular QQ instant messaging service…
In 2005, Yahoo paid $1 billion in cash for a 40 percent share of Alibaba and handed its China operations over to the Alibaba Group and its chairman and chief executive, Jack Ma, a former English teacher from Hangzhou, where Alibaba is based. At that time, the Alibaba Group was valued at about $4 billion. [Full Text]
(Photo of Ma Yun, the CEO of Alibaba)
