Alibaba.com CEO Jack Ma has his eyes on Yahoo
In a talk at Stanford University recently, Alibaba CEO and chairman Jack Ma said, “We are very, very interested” in buying Yahoo, and he meant the whole lot.
The chief executive of one of China’s largest websites stated, “We are very interested in Yahoo. Our Alibaba group is important to Yahoo, and Yahoo is important to us… All the serious buyers interested in Yahoo have talked to us.”
Founded in 1998, Alibaba is a large, privately owned group of web-based businesses. The group is probably most famous for its b2b (business to business) international and domestic trade. Services provided and owned by the Alibaba group include payment platforms, a shopping search engine (similar to google product search) and cloud computing services. Alibaba currently employs 22,000 people across 70 different cities and has offices worldwide. As it stands, Yahoo own a 40% stake in the company.
It was rumored earlier this month that Yahoo were in merger / acquisition talks with AOL, since which both have suffered hardship in the media and in the marketplace. Since the firing of their former CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo has become increasingly unstable. You can see for yourself the shaky few weeks that they have endured here (Google Finance). However, since the news about Alibaba, investors seem to have shown some positive interest in the strength of the company.
According to Venture Beat, ”Yahoo invested $1 billion in cash to purchase Alibaba.com shares, giving Yahoo a 40 percent economic interest with 35 percent voting rights, making it the largest strategic investor in Alibaba.com”.
News Source: venturebeat.com
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