Slashdot Mirror
Alibaba Confirms Plans To Offer IPO In US
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."
Oh boy, more Chinese criminals operating in the US.
an ill wind that blows no good
I presume that the Alibaba Group has forty directors running it, and that every single one of them has "sticky fingers."
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Well if this gives Ebay a run for its money, I'm all for it.
Amazon sells most goods from China, but Alibaba will be able to underprice Amazon. It has direct access to the manufacturers in China.
Short term, no problem. Long term, Alibaba beats Amazon.
I wouldn't want to be hanging onto Amazon stock right now...
No better place to get unlicensed Segway clones and other IP violating products.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Alibaba’s portals handled gross sales of $170 billion in 2012–that is more than eBay and Amazon’s gross sales combined..
Alibaba is HUGE. Every US online retailer should be scared. Alibaba has the potential to take them ALL down.
Opinions from customers of Alibaba in China are, from what I've heard, that their delivery service leaves a whole lot to be desired. Considering that for growth they'd have to expand outside of China, and compete with Amazon's seemingly unstoppable growth and awesome customer service, with a business model that covers both direct sales and third party listings almost seamlessly, I'd not bet be entirely willing to be on Alibaba. I'd wish them luck, I want someone to compete with Amazon. But I'd not place money on it.
Combined with an exchange, closer to home, losing out for having "objected to some of Alibaba's proposed listing terms." It reminds me a bit too much of The Wolf of Wallstreet. If they're so successful why would they need to raise $15 billion other than for a cash-in?
Translation, They have a website.
Yes, in the same sense that Amazon "has a website", except that Alibaba is far bigger than Amazon.
Amazon sells most goods from China, but Alibaba will be able to underprice Amazon.
I totally agree with your point, but so far the move of listing on a U.S. stock exchange seems to mean just raising capital - not necessarily a greater expansion of U.S. sales.
I wouldn't want to be hanging onto Amazon stock right now...
I'm not sure why given that revenue drops seem to only make Amazon stock go up in value, not down. A strong competitor should REALLY raise the AMZN share price... :-)
On a personal note, I would really welcome a strong competitor to Amazon, because right now there just is not anyone filling that role.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I made the error of buying a few items through Alibaba. Everything is either misrepresented, falsely speced, defective or counterfeit. While Alibaba maintains the pretext of settling disputes with the thieves, they always side with the thieves, so much so that the thieves don't even bother to dispute customers claims, they know that Alibaba always sides with them anyway. Avoid buying anything through Alibaba or buy one share of stock, if you can manage to go to the shareholder meeting and try to hold people accountable.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
TFS/TFA indicate Alibaba is going to raise money through an IPO and be listed on a US stock exchange . No indication they are going to move into retailing in the US. Yet.
Are for losers. Some of us dont believe in them. At all.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Alibaba are understand good seller and all for American company and abroad. As Amwerican many buyer I estanblish Alibaba as best.
John R. from America
Ok, that was perfect! Thank you.
If they IPO in the US they will have to be held accountable to consumer protection laws. Right now the credit card companies are holding the bag for incorrect items delivered, and faulty merchandise. About 1/2 of the Items I have ordered from them have actually arrived and 1/2 were actually the product I ordered. I ordered 16 186500 batteries once and received 64 AA batteries. I charged back the order with my credit card company.
Bullshit. They remove the bad reviews. Don't take my word for it, read what others say on Reseller Ratings.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
A better comparison is ebay, amazon sells a lot of stuff directly to the consumer and has the market place features. Alibaba is like ebay in the sense that you have sellers and buyers, you're not buying from Alibaba, you're buying from a seller through Alibaba.
And what about sex robots?
It will have a similar market cap to Amazon. So, no, it's not far bigger.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Which they don't follow. http://www.investopedia.com/te... There's ALL sorts of games you can play with revenue recognition alone.
Anyone here want to rely on Chinese accounting practices? http://www.chinaaccountingblog...
There are no securities laws in China similar to those in the US that require transparency so investors know what they are buying.
Hell, this will be a great IPO, just flip it on the first day. Make your profit and watch it crash.
And now to illustrate: the classic accountant's joke.
There once was a business owner who was interviewing people for a division manager position. He decided to select the individual that could answer the question "how much is 2+2?"
The engineer pulled out his slide rule and shuffled it back and forth, and finally announced, "It lies between 3.98 and 4.02".
The mathematician said, "In two hours I can demonstrate it equals 4 with the following short proof."
The physicist declared, "It's in the magnitude of 1x101."
The logician paused for a long while and then said, "This problem is solvable."
The social worker said, "I don't know the answer, but I a glad that we discussed this important question.
The attorney stated, "In the case of Svenson vs. the State, 2+2 was declared to be 4."
The trader asked, "Are you buying or selling?"
The accountant looked at the business owner, then got out of his chair, went to see if anyone was listening at the door and pulled the drapes. Then he returned to the business owner, leaned across the desk and said in a low voice, "What would you like it to be?"
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
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.
I don't know what ratio of "Internet e-commerce market in China" is export vs internal consumption but the average Chinese person has little knowledge of Alibaba, they use Taobao. The basic point if the article is still valid as Taobao is part of the Alibaba group.
Making an online purchase is pain inside China if you don't speak Chinese. Alibaba Express is for export only, so blocks China as shipping destination. Inside China you are expected to use Taobao, but Taobao is Chinese language only.
Bottom line of the fairy tale, Alibaba knew the treasure was stolen from other people but he kept it to himself.
He made no effort to return it to it’s rightful owners, instead he made every effort to hide and keep the stolen treasure.
What a fine, upstanding, moral man. Eh?
Yup...
This is the arm for the little guy. ; This one is for wholesale business
Its amazing what you can get over there. You can buy anything from a completely assembled product down to every little piece that goes to make one. I am currently looking into having some of my stuff replicated and sold through them.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Having bought a few things through Alibaba/Aliexpress I've had no real issues
Sure, some stuff is cheap, but it's fairly easy to tell that from the photos if you're paying attention. A lot of stuff is fairly decent though.
I had one order that was really not as described. Got a refund within a week of initial complaint with no requirement to return the defective stock (not that I kept it - was useless).
The only other issue I've had is the seller not using the postal service I requested. The item still got to me, just a week or 2 later than expected.
I don't think market cap is a good measure of size. If it were, then during the dotcom boom various online pet food suppliers, etc, which had barely any assets, employees or customers, would have counted as 'bigger' than more boring companies with a much greater footprint in the real world. Similarly, a large company may head towards bankruptcy and as it does so its market cap heads towards zero. But even if it is sold for a nominal price of one dollar, it is still a big company by any reasonable measure.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Do you know Steve from California?
Yahoo is getting more lift from this than her brilliance so far.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
I've bought _many_ things through AliExpress the last couple of years. I have had exactly zero problems. Mostly electronics, and everything from a single cable to larger stuff. Once I ordered a suspiciously cheap android tablet, but got an email from AliExpress a few hours later saying that the order had been cancelled by them since the seller could not produce evidence that they had the actual products.
That said, there are certainly some counterfeit products there, but most of the time that's stated (as "not original") in the description. I think most people just doesn't read the descriptions carefully.
Yes, at first I read the headline to mean that Alabama would have an IPO!
In case you're not familiar, Allibaba is where they sell illegal ripoff counterfeits (that are marked as such), low quality electronics that break instantly, and where basically every seller is a scammer and doesn't speak english or have a customer support department. Yeah...that'll show Amazon what's what. This is going to make the impending Facebook and Apple stock crashes look small by comparison.
Translation, They have a website.
Yes, in the same sense that Amazon "has a website", except that Alibaba is far bigger than Amazon.
And offers much better deals.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada