Alibaba: Let’s Get the Roadshow Rolling　　阿里巴巴：我们开始路演吧

By newsdoug on June 9, 2012

Alibaba's Jack Ma raises profile After several years of keeping an extremely low profile, Alibaba founder and chief Jack Ma is suddenly coming back out into the open with some major interviews as the e-commerce giant gets set to embark on what could well become one of the longest roadshows for a China Internet IPO. In all fairness, an IPO may not be the only thing on Ma’s mind right now, following his company’s recent deal to purchase about half of the 40 percent of itself owned by Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO). Ma and Alibaba have made it known for a while that they intend to sell most or all of that reacquired stake to new investors, and various reports have appeared over the last month stating interest was coming from various investors, including sovereign wealth funds Temasek of Singapore and China’s own China Investment Corp, also known as CIC. In a strong break with the past few years, Ma himself has granted at least 2 new interviews to major media, with both Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal featuring stories quoting the founder of China’s largest e-commerce company. (Bloomberg report; Wall Street Journal report) As a former reporter in the China Internet sector, I can recall how Ma was quite keen to do interviews in Alibaba’s early days, when he loved to say how his company and the Internet in general were leveling the playing field for small Chinese entrepreneurs. But then he largely stopped doing interviews over the past few years, as the company’s only publicly traded unit, business-to-business marketplace Alibaba.com (HKEx: 1688), saw its growth slow considerably, and as Alibaba’s relationship with Yahoo soured, and its various units became embroiled in a series of controversies. With many of those issues now settled, including the recent Yahoo purchase and the imminent privatization of Alibaba.com, Ma is clearly feeling more confident about stepping back into the spotlight to start trumpeting his company as it seeks to find major new investors and move towards its ultimate goal of an IPO for the entire group. I’ve had a look at the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reports, and have to say there’s nothing really ground breaking in either. Ma confirmed that he’s open to investments from Temasek and CIC, and the group’s CFO Joe Tsai also gave some financials, including that Alibaba’s main 2 consumer focused e-commerce sites, Taobao and TMall, collectively earned around $1.8 billion in revenue last year, and that both have profit margins of more than 50 percent. I suspect that Ma will become more public in the next few months as he courts new investors and tries to raise both his company’s profile and valuation even higher than the $30 billion level set with the Yahoo buyout. In terms of timing, I would expect to see the first big new investors on board as soon as the third quarter, and we could also simply see a single major announcement by the end of the year about a new investor group. As to the IPO, the company has given a time frame of 2015 for the offering, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see that moved up by a year or more if a much needed correction starts to accelerate in China’s e-commerce market and investors start to get nervous.

Bottom line: With many of its issues now behind it, Alibaba will raise its profile in the next few months as it seeks new investors and starts to build hype in the run-up to its eventual IPO.

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