Payday is coming for Alibaba
Ma means ‘horse’ in Chinese, and Jack Ma is riding at a gallop these days.
Ma is chairman of Alibaba Group, the parent of such well-known Chinese internet companies as alibaba.com, the mainland’s biggest trading website for businesses, and taobao.com, which has overtaken eBay to become China’s largest auction portal.
Ma’s payday is arriving. Alibaba is going public in Hong Kong and the shares are 50 times oversubscribed. Demand is huge. We are witnessing the birth of China’s biggest internet company, one that may become a global giant someday.
A Bloomberg report a few moments ago says the initial public offering price for Alibaba has been raised from $10 to $12 Hong Kong dollars a share up to $13.50 And the South China Morning Post says companies like Cisco, the giant maker of computer-networking equipment, and American International Group, are ponying up money to buy shares.
Alibaba shares begin trading on the Hong Kong market Nov. 6.
Ma, a 43-year-old former English teacher from Hangzhou, founded Alibaba in 1999, and nearly went under when the internet bubble fizzled a year or two later.
But the guy is a force of nature. Ma already engineered the takeover of the mainland operations of Yahoo! in 2005, giving the company a 40 percent stake in Alibaba.
In a recent Asian Wall Street Journal interview, he said Ma wants his company “to learn from and surpass” such great companies as Google, Wal-Mart, General Electric and Microsoft. Here’s a snippet from the interview:
“I do not think that China has a really powerful Internet company yet. After the base population of Chinese Internet users has reached 200 million, along with technological innovation, world-class Internet companies will arise. We internally proposed a goal that, within 10 years, we hoped to become one of the three largest global Internet companies. We hope to be in the Fortune 500 and become the world's best employer.”
Jack Ma's very, very sharp. I think he saw what Google was moving towards in becoming a one-stop shop for *everything* and is heading in the same direction with combining Taobao, Alibaba and some other fledgling services under one digital roof. If he ever manages to work out some kind of deal to provide online gaming, I'm scared to think how big Alibaba could wind up being.
Posted by: R. Pine | October 22, 2007 at 08:17 PM
he deserved it.
Posted by: arthur | October 24, 2007 at 12:04 AM