Alibaba files for US IPO

The documents give no indication of the number of shares sold or the pricing of the offering. However, the major exiting shareholder will be Yahoo, which is committed to selling more than one third of its current 22.6% holding. According to Reuters, Alibaba will also sell some new shares.

Yahoo acquired a 40% stake in the Chinese company in 2005 for $1 billion. It exited approximately half of this holding in 2012 when Alibaba completed a share buyback worth $6.3 billion in cash, $800 million in preference shares, and $550 million in patent and licensing payments.

Softbank is the single largest shareholder with a 34.4% stake while Alibaba founder and executive chairman Jack Ma and executive vice chairman Joe Tsai own 8.9% and 3.6%, respectively.

The firm is backed by a string of private equity investors, with the likes of Silver Lake, DST Global, Yunfeng Capital and Temasek Holdings having participated in an employee liquidity event in 2011 and then re-upping when further equity capital was required in support of the Yahoo buyback. That round also featured China Investment Corp, Boyu Capital, CITIC Capital and CDB Capital.

The documents do not specify these investors' holdings or indicate whether they will sell any shares in the offering.

For purposes of the listing, the Alibaba ecosystem comprises three retail marketplaces: Taobao, China's largest online shopping destination; Tmall, the country's largest third-party platform for brands and retailers; and Juhuasuan, a group buying marketplace. They generated a combined gross merchandise value of RMB1.5 trillion ($248 billion) from 231 million active buyers and 8 million active sellers during the year ended December 2013.

Alibaba also operates two wholesale marketplaces - Alibaba.com and 1688.com - global consumer marketplace AliExpress and a cloud computing services business.

The group posted an unaudited net income of RMB17.71 billion for the nine months ended December 2013, up from RMB4.27 billion in the same period of the previous year. Revenues reached RMB40.47 billion for the first nine months, against RMB25.84 billion for comparable period of 2012.

Alibaba has also completed a string of lateral acquisitions and investments in the last 12 months as it seeks to diversify its business and counter the competitive threat posed by the likes of Tencent Holdings and Baidu.

In the mobile space, the company bought an 18% interest in micro-blogging service Weibo for $586 million, paying an additional $449 million to increase its holding to 30% when the company went public; a 66% stake in web browser specialist UCWeb for RMB3.13 billion; and a 20% interest in US-based mobile messaging service TangoMe for an initial $200 million.

A total of $294 million was spent on a 28% interest in digital mapping provider AutoNavi and a further $1.1 billion was offered for full ownership of the company, while HK$5.4 billion ($697 million) was committed to Intime department store for an up to 26% stake.

In the digital media space, Alibaba paid $1 billion for an 16.5% stake in Youku Tudou and HK$6.2 billion for 60% of ChinaVision Media Group.

It also bought a 38% stake in product tracking systems specialist CITIC 21CN for HK$932 million and made two logistics investments - committing HK$2.8 billion to a subsidiary of Haier Electronics and RMB2.15 billion to Cainiao, a joint venture logistics enterprise.

Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Citi are running the offering.

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• Topics
• Exits
• Greater China
• Technology
• China
• TMT
• IPO
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• Alibaba Group