Saturday, October 27, 2007

How to Invest in Alibaba.com

Alibaba.com had its initial public offering today, Saturday, October 27, and is expected to start trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on November 6. They raised $1.5 billion.

Alibaba is the huge Chinese e-commerce company, which has four divisions: Alibaba International [importer to smaller size China business exchange], Alibaba China [subscription fee product postings], TaoBao [consumer to consumer exchange], and AliPay [online payment service].

However, if you don't have access to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, you can invest in a company that has a large (39%) holding in Alibaba Group which is the parent company of Alibaba.com. That company is Yahoo (YHOO) which also bought approximately $100 million of Alibaba.com IPO shares.

2 comments:

Jimmy Chan said...

Hi, Far as I know, "TaoBao [consumer to consumer exchange], and AliPay [online payment service]" these 2 assets are not injected in this IPO stock. that made the stock much less appealing.

Jimmy Chan
kkchan@taifook.com

jpmist said...

Have you really done the math on that? Yahoo owns 40% of a company valued at the time it bought in at $2.5 billion. Even if Alibaba triples, that adds "only" 2 billion to Yahoos balance sheet. Given Yahoo's $45 billion market cap I suppose that's worth 3 or 4 bucks a share. It's already gone up that much since the recent IPO's news.