Yahoo sells 1/2 its Alibaba stake for $7.1B | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo sells 1/2 its Alibaba stake for $7.1B

engadget.com

28 pointsbretpiatt27 comments

Wow, alibaba is actually a legit company? Every time it comes up in a google search, I take a few glances at it, and it just screams "spam, landing page" at me.

Odd.

Has anybody here actually bought anything from them?

For reference, here is a photo of Alibaba's HQ in Hangzhou [1]. In addition to the B2B part that others have discussed, they also own Taobao (the eBay of China) and Alipay (the PayPal of China).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alibaba_group_Headquarters...

Half the stuff in your house was brokered/bought over Alibaba.

Alibaba is actually a huge player in China. Like eBay in its glory days but for a population many times larger.

The Alibaba site itself is basically a B2B supply portal (or "eBay for businesses/traders", if you prefer). Retails consumers have no need for it, but it's huge for businesses. And I think startups will find Alibaba's hold on such a lucrative market very hard to dislodge, even the ones that are Chinese born-and-bred.

It's because you're not in Asia. And what you're seeing is probably a page geared toward B2B not B2C.

Alibaba has been around a long time. They are most definitely a legit company. And a successful one.

> Has anybody here actually bought anything from them?

You don't really buy from Alibaba, you buy through Alibaba. The amount of money we've spent to the Alibaba owned TaoBao is getting very scary indeed. It's like eBay and Amazon combined, filled with a crappy ActiveX plugin (Alipay) to pay - usually combined with a security token from either of the four dozen or so big banks that one may be a member of - and any question you may have pre-sales answered. Or post-sales too. It's what eCommerce should be in the Western world.

To say that TaoBao is the eBay of China is under-exaggerating things by about hundred-fold.

And it's a shame no one in the Western world has heard of it. It's Alexa rank is... 14. And it's crazy to be assuming that Facebook is supposed to be worth $100 billion, but Alibaba just $35 billion. It should be the other way round.

Also, if TaoBao ever decides to launch in the US, it's game over for eBay definitely and beyond any doubt. It might survive as an exclusively craigslist kind of thing. Amazon should be able to compete, but they will lose a lot of market share.

I doubt it would be "game over for eBay". If that were the case, TaoBao would already be here.

What other countries does TaoBao operate in? eBay and Amazon both operate in dozens on countries.

What works only in China works there only for a reason! Government protectionism.

> If that were the case, TaoBao would already be here.

eBay didn't even try to go into wholesale, because Alibaba already has that market, in the US, locked up tight. Like someone else said. Half the stuff in your house was brokered through Alibaba.

> What works only in China works there only for a reason! Government protectionism.

I think it has more to do with shipping being basically nothing and a willingness to do things both vertically and horizontally expansive.

couldn't agree more.

It's one of the biggest players in their market!

So let me get this straight. Yahoo! is getting rid of the only successful asset it has left?

Until right now, Yahoo! had two things going for it: its asian operations (Alibaba, Yahoo! Japan, etc.), and the Hadoop project. Now, it only has one.

If they are to keep the asian assets, they may as well become an investment bank because right now, asset management is the only thing that seems to be working for them. If they still wanna be a technology company they really have to get rid of the stuff that's getting in the way of them doing what they're really supposed to do, which is tech.

Yahoo! doesn't have Hadoop anymore. Key people moved on and formed an independent company Hortonworks.

Yahoo! must be getting desperate. While it was probably the best thing to do, Alibaba is quite profitable is it not? It's worth something like $35B, crazy.

The relationship between Alibaba and Yahoo hasn't been great in a long time, and there's substantial governance risk to owning a large stake in a Chinese company which hates you. Owning 20% of a $35b company could be worth less than $7b if they decide to make things difficult, and there is limited recourse. I don't think this sale is being driven by Yahoo.

Yeah, very true. It's probably best this sale went ahead then. If there is one thing you don't do, its mess with the Chinese especially in the business world. Yahoo! needs the cash anyway.

Yahoo needs many things, but cash isn't one of them. They have no debt and have billions in cash in the bank already that they don't know what to do with. The only reason they are doing this is to appease shareholders. And in that sense I suppose you could say that they need the cash, but short of doing a one-time dividend payout to shareholders I don't think they have any idea what they are going to do with it.

Agree. From my perspective, Mayun, the CEO of Alibaba, precisely provided this trade.

> The deal, announced late Sunday in the U.S., will see Alibaba Group buying back the stake from Yahoo Inc.for $6.3 billion in cash and up to $800 million of Alibaba preference shares.

I'm sure there's a sensible rational for it, but it sounds hilarious for them to be selling their stock in exchange for a bit of cash and some more stock.

The preferred shares are likely callable at the option of Alibaba -- that is, they have the right to buy them back at some defined price at any point in time. They will likely exercise this as soon as they have the liquidity. It's basically just a "we'll pay you 7.1B, some now in cash and 800M later", without having to put debt on the balance sheet.

Yahoo should take the money and go private. Yahoo has a market cap of 19 billion so they should be able to easily borrow the money.

They need to make some big changes to remain viable and imho the only way they're going to be able to do it is out of the glare of the public spotlight.

I dont understand if Alibaba is planning on buying Yahoo why not just buy them outright now and not worry about buying the stock back? If Alibaba bought Yahoo would it not also not then own the Alibaba stock yahoo was holding?

Well, with this deal the Alibaba buyout of Yahoo is obviously off the table.

So Yahoo without Alibaba is worth about $4.6 billion (18.8-14.2), subtract the $2.1 billion cash and short term investments and you get a price tag of $2.5 billion for all of Yahoo's other operations and assets.

You forgot about the pretty high valued shares they have from Yahoo Japan.

And the value of the other Asian Yahoo properties that are fully owned by Yahoo. Yahoo! Taiwan is by far the most visited site in the country, for example. Well ahead of both Facebook and Google. Same goes for Hong Kong. Obviously smaller markets, but one has to wonder what Yahoo! Taiwan/Hong Kong would be worth as a standalone company. It seems to me that would easily be $2B for just that part. Add that to Yahoo! Japan and Yahoo US is valued at some large negative number.

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