[photopress:IT_alibaba_jack_ma.jpg,full,alignright]Shares of the e-commerce company partly owned by Yahoo! will begin trading on November 6 in an offering to be co-managed by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley
Founder and chief executive officer Jack Ma, seen here, spoke to reporters to reveal details of the deal. The company expects to raise about $1.5 billion in an IPO to be co-managed by Goldman Sachs (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS). Trading.
The Alibaba listing is not just a key event for the company; It also promises to be watershed moment for the Chinese online world.
With more than 160 million people using the Internet now, China has the world’s second-largest Net population after the U.S.
But while a few Nasdaq-listed Chinese dot-coms such as search engine Baidu and portal Sina have done well by selling keywords or banner advertising, until now there hasn’t been a Chinese e-commerce company that’s generated much interest among investors.
There’s also a renewed interest in some of the first-generation portals that were among the first Chinese Internet companies to go public on Nasdaq during the days of the U.S. internet bubble. The share prices of top Chinese portals Sohu and Sina are up sharply this year amid confidence that online advertising will increase ahead of Beijing’s hosting of the Summer Olympics next year.
Morgan Stanley (MS) predicts that China’s online advertising market will total $2.4 billion in 2008, an increase of about 45% year over year.
Source: Business Week
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