Alibaba Confirms Plans To Offer IPO In US 93
hackingbear writes "China e-commerce giant Alibaba Group confirmed early Sunday that it plans to become a public company in the US. The proposed US IPO, which is expected to raise more than $15 billion, is a bid winning over Hong Kong stock exchange, which had been competing for the offering with US stock exchanges but objected to some of Alibaba's proposed listing terms. Founded in 1999 by former English teacher Jack Ma, the Hangzhou, China company, of which Yahoo owns 24%, provides marketplace platforms that allow merchants to sell goods directly to consumers controlling 80% of Internet e-commerce market in China."
Alibaba is bigger than Amazon and Ebay combined (Score:2, Informative)
Alibaba’s portals handled gross sales of $170 billion in 2012–that is more than eBay and Amazon’s gross sales combined. [forbes.com].
Alibaba is HUGE. Every US online retailer should be scared. Alibaba has the potential to take them ALL down.
Re:The group's Board of Directors (Score:5, Informative)
LOL...good one. Wish I had a mod point.
In actuality, the Alibaba Group has 28 partners, and they are at the heart of the reason why the HKEx is refusing the IPO.
The listing terms that the HKEx finds objectionable are centered around the proposed structure of the company, which would allow their 28 partners to control a majority of the board [reuters.com] - even though they only own around 13 percent of the company.
Apparently, the HKEx regulators still cling to the quaint notion that small investors are important. I guess those HK guys have a thing or two left to learn about how real capitalism works.
Re:Alibaba and the thieves (Score:0, Informative)
I'm in the US and have ordered about 20 items from Alibaba in the past for the most part I've had good experiences with the site. When talking about the site with others I refer to it as the Chinese ebay. With that said, just like ebay you have to read the reviews, if there are no reviews then you're pretty much rolling the dice which I usually do not do, I stick to buying items with many reviews and from sellers with again many reviews.
they remove the bad reviews (Score:4, Informative)
My story with Alibaba (Score:5, Informative)
When Steve Jobs gave his first iPhone demo, I had my doubts when he claimed that you didn't need stylus pens with touch screens. Seeing the frenzy with which people wanted iPhones in the coming months, I decided to make an investment and buying a large quantity of stylus pens, whose price I expected would rise. I approached several vendors on Alibaba. The process was surprisingly smooth - most of the vendors seemed to have communication reps who were nice to talk to/interact with and knew their stuff very well. The prices were insane. I could buy pens that could be purchased for $30 in the US for 10 cents a piece, if I bought then in bulk. For another 5 cents I could brand them, and for another 10 I could customize them. So I ended up buying 100k of them and having them shipped to a warehouse in Philadelphia, where I rented some space out for ~$50/month. My most memorable feeling from this experience was not the profit I made (not that much, it looks like a lot of other people had the same idea as I did...) but realizing how easy it was to get something custom-manufactured half way across the world, have 100s of thousands of pieces hauled across on boats to a few miles from where I live. Something Marco Polo would have marveled at... Alibaba is only the front end to an unbelievable system of proxy manufacturing.
Re:"provides marketplace platforms" (Score:2, Informative)
Ali Express is like Amazon Stores. It has fixed prices and Alibaba handles the payment processing and escrow, the vendor supplies the goods and handles delivery.
Alibaba.com is more like Craigslist, but for large industrial producers to list their wares, often without public pricing.