Alibaba stock trading halted amid talks with Yahoo deal Alibaba privatization offer made official

Alibaba founder Jack Ma ready to make privatization offer at HK13.50 per share

Posted by Aliuser on Feb 16, 2012 in Alibaba Hong Kong

Alibaba Jack Ma is likely to offer minority shareholders HK13.5 per share to take its Hong Kong-listed company Alibaba.com (HKSE 1688) back to a private company. Alibaba group of companies own 73.1 per cent of Alibaba.com shares. To complete the deal, Jack Ma and his team would pay US 2.3 billion (HK18.23 billion) in total.

Market sources said that the offer price would be close to or same as its IPO’ s price and is 46 per cent higher than its closed price before suspension. Alibaba spokesman declines to comment.

Yahoo! is currently holding discussions to sell its stakes in e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding and Yahoo Japan back to Alibaba and Yahoo Japan shareholder Softbank Corp.

Under the details of the deal being talked about, Alibaba would inject up to $6 billion of cash and $3 billion of assets into a new subsidiary. The idea is to make the transaction tax-free for Yahoo. One snag is that Yahoo! may be eyeing assets that Alibaba doesn’t yet own, such as some businesses in the United States. Another is that the Internal Revenue Service may deem it a sale anyway, which would be taxable, as opposed to a tax-free asset-shuffling. Discussion was tensed while both parties – Alibaba and Yahoo! failed to reach agreement.

Alibaba.com was listed in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at the IPO price of HK$13.5 on 6 November 2007, raising HK$13.1 billion (US$1.7 billion) in the second-largest initial public offering sale of an Internet company after Google Inc.

As the largest China B2B company, Alibaba halted its trading last week on Thursday.