According to several report the China Internet giant Alibaba Group is very interested in buying Yahoo.
The Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Jack Ma, told reporters last week when he was speaking at at a forum at Stanford University in Silicon Valley that “We are very, very interested” in Yahoo.
Alibaba dominates ecommerce in China with its C2C domestic Taobao auction site, B2B global Alibaba marketplace, and its B2C Taobao Mall marketplace for brands, along with its online payment service Alipay.
Alibaba also offers a host of services to online merchants and small businesses.
Yahoo’s owns 40% of Alibaba.
According to Alexa Alibaba.com is the 73rd busiest site in the world.
Yahoo.com is number 4.
Alibaba has a market cap of $36B on the Hong Kong Exchange(1688:HK)
Yahoo.com (Nasdaq: YHOO )has a market cap of something north of $16 Billion but 1/3 of its cap is based on its 40% ownership of Alibaba.
Last week one of Alibaba companies, HiChina which has been referred to as the Godaddy of China announced it would be going public with a $200 Million dollar IPO.
Asked which parts of Yahoo! he was most interested in, Mr Ma added that he wanted “the whole piece of Yahoo! China is already ours, right? It’s already in my pocket.”
Meantime Yahoo is busy trying to find a new CEO reports the WallStreetJournal.com
“””Yahoo’s board is open to hiring a leader “who is open-minded to a broad range of options,” including a sale of the company, said a person familiar with the matter. The board also is interested in potentially finding a new CEO with “consumer experience” who could help Yahoo launch new services and stay relevant in the age of Facebook and Google.””
Of course since Yahoo/Bing is only one of two upstream PPC partners the future of the company should be of some concern to all domainers.
If you don’t like what Google is paying you now wait until Yahoo is gone
Well I think Yahoo would be done it they sold to the Chinese. Now the Chinese want data mining on American Citizens? All we could do is block Yahoo.com
Alibaba, I thought that was a company from India. I wonder what else we are going to sell to the Chinese. No wonder we are getting our butt kicked.
One of the founders of Yahoo was a chinese guy right? They were a good website until they kicked him out.
Thank you for letting me know. I’ll delete the rest of my yahoo crap immediately.
I actually like yahoo news, finance and email. It is presented well and clearly displayed, so hopefully they don’t change much. Wonder if yahoo stock is worth buying now, Alibaba would likely have to pay a premium.
Yahoo stock rose several % Friday on the story
this news is only a good boost for Microsoft to quickly buy Yahoo
Not going to happen.
Math has never been my best subject but how does owning 40% of 36B translate to 1/3rd of 16B?
“Alibaba has a market cap of $36B on the Hong Kong Exchange(1688:HK)
Yahoo.com (Nasdaq: YHOO )has a market cap of something north of $16 Billion but 1/3 of its cap is based on its 40% ownership of Alibaba.”
RL is right. Yahoo’s equity in Alibaba alone is worth $14.4B which is close to Yahoo’s entire $16.5B market cap. Either Yahoo’s core business is almost worthless and/or it’s a great way to buy Alibaba’s stock cheap.
their initial focus was import/export and b2b. recently they added a service for overseas consumers. a year later paypal (ebay) stopped doing business with them. hmm, i wonder why?
with hichina, and perhaps yahoo, they have much greater access to consumers. do consumers want cheaper stuff? do they want the latest electronics that are available in asia (e.g. japan) but not in the west?
what does amazon think about this?
In the mid 1970’s, the CIA sought to recover a sunken Russian Submarine. The mission was labeled “Project Azorian” and done with involvement from billionaire Howard Hughes, who provided the cover story… That he was building this huge, highly bizarre ship to mine the ocean floor for manganese.
AliBaba buys Yahoo, it will magically become the RT of search engines. (be prepared for an “told ya so”)
query: “Does China oppress its people?”
Yahoo SERP p1p1: http://www.gov.cn/english/civilrights
Content: The government of China is committed to the freedom of its citizens unlike any other government on earth… China is the freest society on the planet. The US, however, really sucks and here’s why…
query: productABC lowest price
Yahoo SERP p1p1: http://alibaba.com
that’s the issue.
it’s why google is drawing unnecessary attention to its monopoly position.
it was bad enough that search engines sold out to paid-search-dominated serps back in the 90’s.
then google came along. they were an alternative.
but these days google’s results are filled with google websites. we’re back where we started.
the percentage of url’s pointing to google-owned sites in their serps just keeps growing. why? they are making bank without having to do that.
give the credit to facebook and apple with their hotel california mentality (check out any time you like, but you can never leave). google feels it has to compete.
no doubt ebay and amazon would love to have their own search engines. amzn tried with a9 but it never gained traction. alibaba getting its own search engine would be very nice for alibaba.
I have used alibaba before but was not aware how huge of a company they actually are. To be considering buying Yahoo is very ambitious indeed. Would certainly compliment their existing business and open up new opportunities. Will be interesting to see how it pans out.
Rick,
I am a long time stock investor so i can understand this. In many cases i have even seen that the holding company is even priced less than the price of the stock it hold of the the other company.
Stock Market can behave in a very different fashion than such simple calculations. Also it is also the sentiments game . These days chinese & their companies are in High PE . In 2008 the chinese index was more than 50 PE if i my memory serves right. Where as in US such PE are non existent at least in Large or Midcaps
🙂