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Alibaba Raises $21.8B in Initial Public Offering

nytimes.com

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Re: Alibaba Raises $21.8B in Initial Public Offering

#51

Post by majani »

xux wrote: post #28
bane wrote: post #4

Gosh....that's barely more than WhatsApp. Woulda done better selling it to Facebook. More seriously, the Economist put a valuation at $55-$120b. This puts it at $168b. Or 9 WhatsApps. The IPO was expected to raise $20b, so this is really good. It took 3 years after founding in 1998 to reach profitability. It defies most conventional notions of a startup, despite having started in somebody's apartment. It's unbelievab…

>It defies most conventional notions of a startup... It's unbelievably unfocused, it does pretty much every kind of business you can do on the Internet. It defies the Silicon Valley notion of startup. China's internet market is still new, and Alibaba is like Yahoo in the old days - it does everything online. Hopefully it doesn't turn out like Yahoo.

and if you look at Alibaba history, Jack Ma was admittedly one of the speculators who rushed online in 1999 to make a buck. Silicon Valley historians heads must be spinning :)

Re: Alibaba Raises $21.8B in Initial Public Offering

#52

Post by jarsin »

skuhn wrote: post #5

Alibaba going for a higher selling price just makes the continued undervaluing of Yahoo itself increasingly hilarious. At some point, I would think someone will want to buy them for all of this free money they have sitting around. YHOO market cap : 42.3bn + liabilities : 3.7bn = 46bn (to own outright) Meanwhile: Cash on hand = 1.1bn + Other assets = 15.3bn + Cash from Alibaba sale = 8.3bn + Value of remaining Alibaba…

I'm in someone give me a $46Bn loan!

Re: Alibaba Raises $21.8B in Initial Public Offering

#54

Post by downandout »

richard_cubano wrote: post #25
skuhn wrote: post #5

Alibaba going for a higher selling price just makes the continued undervaluing of Yahoo itself increasingly hilarious. At some point, I would think someone will want to buy them for all of this free money they have sitting around. YHOO market cap : 42.3bn + liabilities : 3.7bn = 46bn (to own outright) Meanwhile: Cash on hand = 1.1bn + Other assets = 15.3bn + Cash from Alibaba sale = 8.3bn + Value of remaining Alibaba…

This has been covered ad nauseum elsewhere in the financial press, but you're assuming Yahoo pays zero corporate taxes on its sale of Alibaba shares. That's not how the world works. You need to deduct something like 40% from the value of the "Cash from Alibaba sale" and "Value of remaining Alibaba stock" and probably also "Value of Yahoo Japan stock". My bet is if you do that, you'll come up with a number that makes…

Capital gains are 20%, not 40%. And these are most assuredly capital gains. On $8b they'll pay $1.6b in taxes.

Re: Alibaba Raises $21.8B in Initial Public Offering

#55

Post by GigabyteCoin »

skuhn wrote: post #5

Alibaba going for a higher selling price just makes the continued undervaluing of Yahoo itself increasingly hilarious. At some point, I would think someone will want to buy them for all of this free money they have sitting around. YHOO market cap : 42.3bn + liabilities : 3.7bn = 46bn (to own outright) Meanwhile: Cash on hand = 1.1bn + Other assets = 15.3bn + Cash from Alibaba sale = 8.3bn + Value of remaining Alibaba…

But how much would the Yahoo Japan stock really be worth if the world knew somebody was liquidating the entire Yahoo company?

I think that's your $9B profit right there.

Re: Alibaba Raises $21.8B in Initial Public Offering

#56

Post by downandout »

skuhn wrote: post #5

Alibaba going for a higher selling price just makes the continued undervaluing of Yahoo itself increasingly hilarious. At some point, I would think someone will want to buy them for all of this free money they have sitting around. YHOO market cap : 42.3bn + liabilities : 3.7bn = 46bn (to own outright) Meanwhile: Cash on hand = 1.1bn + Other assets = 15.3bn + Cash from Alibaba sale = 8.3bn + Value of remaining Alibaba…

No need to fire everyone. Yahoo made $38M net profit on operations last quarter. All they would have to do is maintain their current assets and employees and the owners get $160m/year in free cash. Then, using their effectively unlimited supply of capital in the form of Alibaba stock, they could make some very smart acquisitions (think for example of buying an instagram for $1b cash and growing it to what it is today) and they could pretty quickly be a $100b company.

I am not not sure if Marissa is up to the task, but they do have a legion of smart employees and an insane amount of capital. If they fail to build meaningful growth now, it's her fault.

Re: Alibaba Raises $21.8B in Initial Public Offering

#57

Post by foxhedgehog »

jacquesm wrote: post #30
bane wrote: post #4

Gosh....that's barely more than WhatsApp. Woulda done better selling it to Facebook. More seriously, the Economist put a valuation at $55-$120b. This puts it at $168b. Or 9 WhatsApps. The IPO was expected to raise $20b, so this is really good. It took 3 years after founding in 1998 to reach profitability. It defies most conventional notions of a startup, despite having started in somebody's apartment. It's unbelievab…

> It's unbelievably unfocused That's because Jack Ma is unbelievably focused.

And also because he does not face competition.

Re: Alibaba Raises $21.8B in Initial Public Offering

#59

Post by grinich »

downandout wrote: post #56
skuhn wrote: post #5

Alibaba going for a higher selling price just makes the continued undervaluing of Yahoo itself increasingly hilarious. At some point, I would think someone will want to buy them for all of this free money they have sitting around. YHOO market cap : 42.3bn + liabilities : 3.7bn = 46bn (to own outright) Meanwhile: Cash on hand = 1.1bn + Other assets = 15.3bn + Cash from Alibaba sale = 8.3bn + Value of remaining Alibaba…

No need to fire everyone. Yahoo made $38M net profit on operations last quarter. All they would have to do is maintain their current assets and employees and the owners get $160m/year in free cash. Then, using their effectively unlimited supply of capital in the form of Alibaba stock, they could make some very smart acquisitions (think for example of buying an instagram for $1b cash and growing it to what it is today…

Why don't you think Marisa is up to the task? She seems more than capable to me, and has done a remarkable job leading Yahoo so far.

Re: Alibaba Raises $21.8B in Initial Public Offering

#60

Post by skuhn »

downandout wrote: post #56
skuhn wrote: post #5

Alibaba going for a higher selling price just makes the continued undervaluing of Yahoo itself increasingly hilarious. At some point, I would think someone will want to buy them for all of this free money they have sitting around. YHOO market cap : 42.3bn + liabilities : 3.7bn = 46bn (to own outright) Meanwhile: Cash on hand = 1.1bn + Other assets = 15.3bn + Cash from Alibaba sale = 8.3bn + Value of remaining Alibaba…

No need to fire everyone. Yahoo made $38M net profit on operations last quarter. All they would have to do is maintain their current assets and employees and the owners get $160m/year in free cash. Then, using their effectively unlimited supply of capital in the form of Alibaba stock, they could make some very smart acquisitions (think for example of buying an instagram for $1b cash and growing it to what it is today…

They do still have some smart people, but I don't think anyone or any amount of money can turn things around for them in any meaningful way.

Their pre-Marissa acquisitions were almost universally wastes of time and money. It's too soon to tell about the recent acquisitions, but I don't see them making that $1bn back from Tumblr in my lifetime.

Yahoo is an also ran, constantly playing catch up and trying to emulate the successful behaviors of other companies. The negative public perception of a lot of their services in the technical community is mirrored inside the company, and there is nothing anyone can do to force positive change. Things that Google and Facebook and others announce were projects 3-4 years ago inside Yahoo, that never launched. Once you see that happen a few times, you get sufficiently disillusioned and leave. I don't think for all of Marissa's impact that this has fundamentally changed.

For example: Yahoo employees have to use Yahoo Mail for all of their work e-mail. The web interface only, with ads. It's a great exercise in dogfooding, IF you commit to rapidly iterating on the product to make it best of breed for your employees (not to mention real users). But that will never happen at Yahoo, there is no will to make an excellent product for a technically demanding audience.

Now your employee productivity suffers, which means every other product in the company suffers. Eventually you will have to let them go back to using e-mail the way they want to or they will find a way to screen scrape the messages into fetchmail in order to get back to work.

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