Alibaba shakes up global markets
Chinese e-commerce giant’s choice of NYSE for IPO a blow to Hong Kong exchange.
S AN MATEO, CALIF. Alibaba’s eye-popping IPO plans in the U.S. sent ripples from Hong Kong to New York to Sunnyvale, Calif.
The decision by the Chinese e-commerce leviathan — whose online properties handle more goods than eBay and Amazon combined — to hold its longawaited public offering in the U.S. is a blow to the Hong Kong stock exchange, which was initially the company’s preferred venue. But it’s a boon to two of Alibaba’s big shareholders: Yahoo, which owns 24%; and Japan’s Softbank, which controls 37%.
Alibaba’s success has essentially propped up the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s shares hugely, even as its core business has languished. Shebly Seyrafi, an analyst at FBN Securities, estimated in a recent research note that Alibaba alone is worth $21 of Yahoo’s stock price, which closed at $37.60 on Friday.
Alibaba Group doesn’t report its finances. But Yahoo, which initially invested in it in 2005, said Alibaba’s revenue for the quarter ending in September rose 51% from a year earlier to $1.8 billion. (That’s down from 61% growth year over year in the second quarter of 2013 and 71% in the first quarter of 2013.)
While the Hong Kong market mourns its lost golden goose, U.S. investors have billions of dollar signs dancing in their heads and calculators. Alibaba, which controls about 80% of China’s e-commerce, is sure to add sizzle to the New York financial scene: Its public offering could be one of the biggest ever in the U.S. Some estimates peg its valuation at $130 billion.
Alibaba is among several Chi- nese Internet heavyweights planning to cash in with U.S. IPOs: Sina Corp.’s Weibo microblog unit filed for a potential U.S. IPO; Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, indicates it plans to raise $500 million; and online retailing giant JD.com filed in January for a U.S. stock listing.