Alibaba.com, China's largest online business-to-business (B2B)
marketplace for global and domestic trade, plans what could be a
US$1 billion share sale in Hong Kong to help fuel growth, sources
said.
The company, a subsidiary of the Alibaba Group and 40 percent
owned by Yahoo, picked Hong Kong over the New York and London stock
markets for what would be the biggest initial public offering for a
mainland Internet company.
Investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are arranging
the impending public offering.
Jack Ma, Alibaba's founder, is said to have pondered over
different candidate bourses, including NASDAQ, but chose Hong Kong
because of tighter listing rules in the US, which hold accounting
practices and corporate executives to higher scrutiny.
The US legislation, which was introduced five years ago in the
wake of the Enron and Worldcom scandals, is often the subject of
complaints from existing and potential issuers. It encourages
companies to turn to London or Hong Kong, where regulators are more
flexible.
NASDAQ has been Chinese technology companies' preferred listing
destination for its higher valuations, which generate more
profit.
Baidu.com, the most popular Internet search engine on the
Chinese mainland, listed on the NASDAQ in August 2005. Its shares
have risen five times above the offering price.
Alibaba's Hong Kong listing will involve only the group's
business-to-business unit, which includes a Chinese site that aims
to match traders within the domestic market and an English site for
traders around the world.
Alibaba reaped a revenue of US$200 million last year, twice that
of Baidu's.
HiSoft Technology International Ltd, China's leading software
exporter, plans to float on NASDAQ as early as the end of the year,
becoming the first company in its sector to sell shares on the US
exchange.
"We are preparing for the share offering and expect to complete
the listing in the fourth quarter or before next March," HiSoft
officials told China Daily earlier. They declined to reveal how
much the company is going to raise through the IPO.
The company is based in Hangzhou in East China and has 16 sales
and service centers across China, as well as offices in Hong Kong,
the US and Europe. The company had more than 3,500 full-time
employees at the end of 2006.
(China Daily June 21, 2007)