SoftBank Corporation is doing something unusual to try and stop Dish Network’s acquisition offer for Sprint Nextel Corp. SoftBank owns 33% of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and reportedly threatened banks that if they financed Dish’s $25.5 billion rival offer, it would hurt their chances of landing a role in Alibaba’s IPO, according to sources with Reuters.
Chinese e-commerce company, Alibaba Group, is going to buy a 28% stake in a digital mapping company called AutoNavi Holdings Ltd (NASDAQ:AMAP) for $294 million, according to Chinese news portal Sina. Alibaba will become the largest shareholder in AutoNavi. Alibaba also recently bought an 18% stake in Sina Corp’s microblogging service Weibo, which has similar functionalities as Twitter.
Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba has acquired an 18% stake in Sina’s Weibo. Weibo is a Chinese microblogging service that is similar to Twitter. The 18% stake will cost Alibaba $586 million. Alibaba will have the option to increase their shares in Weibo up to about 30%.
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Alibaba Group has announced that Jonathan Lu Zhaoxi will be replacing Jack Ma as CEO starting on May 10th. Ma, 48, will become executive chairman and will be involved in the company’s management development and business strategy going forward.
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Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba is preparing for an IPO in the second half of 2013 or early 2014 according to a report from Marbridge Daily. Marbridge referred to a Chinese-language website called Sootoo.com, which supposedly found out the information from a leaked internal memo. Alibaba Group acquired half of the stake in their company back from Yahoo! They also have the right to buy back the rest when Alibaba launches an IPO.
Alibaba has sold one trillion RMB worth of goods in 2012. That is the equivalent of $157 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV). This means that Alibaba has surpassed U.S. e-commerce companies Amazon.com and eBay combined.
Alibaba Group is building their own mobile operating system called Aliyun and it is powering a device called the Acer CloudMobile, which means that the Chinese e-commerce company has already hit the ground running. Alibaba is going to be spinning off a team to focus exclusively on the Aliyun operating system. Google is not too happy with Aliyun because they claim it uses certain aspects built into Google Android. Alibaba is also investing $200 million into the Aliyun spin-off to be as strong as Android in China.
After taxes, Yahoo! will make around $4.3-$4.5 billion from the $7.6 billion Alibaba deal. Yahoo! is selling a portion of their stake in Alibaba. In a memo to employees Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer said that she will be returning $3.65 billion of that to shareholders. Yahoo! will be keeping $650 million for themselves. Below is a memo that Mayer sent to employees. Below is the memo:
