In Q2 2018, Global VC Scales Tipped In Favor Of Chinese Startups Over American
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Re: In Q2 2018, Global VC Scales Tipped In Favor Of Chinese Startups Over American
#2Good luck and have fun with that. Double up on your due diligence there, as lies abound and there are no rules.
Re: In Q2 2018, Global VC Scales Tipped In Favor Of Chinese Startups Over American
#3>>>In early June, news broke that Ant Financial, an electronic payments service company affiliated with Alibaba, had raised a staggering $14 billion in what’s technically a Series C round. To date, it’s the largest venture funding round in history. Led by Temasek Holdings and GIC (a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund), the round reportedly values Ant Financial at $150 billion. For perspective, that’s roughly twice Uber’s valuation and within spitting distance of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s current net worth.
Hmmmm, just shows how little I understand about evaluation and/or VC because this seems crazy to me.
Re: In Q2 2018, Global VC Scales Tipped In Favor Of Chinese Startups Over American
#4>>>In early June, news broke that Ant Financial, an electronic payments service company affiliated with Alibaba, had raised a staggering $14 billion in what’s technically a Series C round. To date, it’s the largest venture funding round in history. Led by Temasek Holdings and GIC (a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund), the round reportedly values Ant Financial at $150 billion. For perspective, that’s roughly twice Ube…
Ant Financial is handling ~$4 trillion in payment processing annually. They have about half of the Chinese mobile payments market in Alipay (WeChat has something like 35-40%). They've moved into numerous financial segments.
They had about $9 billion in revenue in 2017, and are nearing a billion users.
The $150b valuation is rich, however it's about 1/3 to 1/4 the PE ratio that Amazon and Netflix are being given currently. At $150b it's trading for ~85 times net profit.
The business is wildly profitable as you might expect. In terms of size, consider how big Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, etc. are.
Visa now has a $294 billion market cap. That's based on $18b in sales and extremely high margins. Mastercard is worth $204 billion. PayPal is worth $100 billion; Ant Financial will be larger than PayPal in terms of sales within 12-24 months (and is comparable now in profit).
The big risk regarding Ant Financial, is that the Chinese authorities are afraid of it and have begun boxing it in with controls. As one might expect, they don't like the idea of a single corporation controlling so much of China's financial flow (unless it's very firmly under the boot of the government).
Re: In Q2 2018, Global VC Scales Tipped In Favor Of Chinese Startups Over American
#5>>>In early June, news broke that Ant Financial, an electronic payments service company affiliated with Alibaba, had raised a staggering $14 billion in what’s technically a Series C round. To date, it’s the largest venture funding round in history. Led by Temasek Holdings and GIC (a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund), the round reportedly values Ant Financial at $150 billion. For perspective, that’s roughly twice Ube…
China is going cashless -mobile payments are increasingly the norm. There are two main ways to pay with your phone wechat pay and Alipay(run by ant financial).
It will potentially handle a huge percentage of ALL payments in a country as big as china.Maybe 150bn isn't such a crazy valuation
Re: In Q2 2018, Global VC Scales Tipped In Favor Of Chinese Startups Over American
#6>>>In early June, news broke that Ant Financial, an electronic payments service company affiliated with Alibaba, had raised a staggering $14 billion in what’s technically a Series C round. To date, it’s the largest venture funding round in history. Led by Temasek Holdings and GIC (a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund), the round reportedly values Ant Financial at $150 billion. For perspective, that’s roughly twice Ube…
Ant Financial is handling ~$4 trillion in payment processing annually. They have about half of the Chinese mobile payments market in Alipay (WeChat has something like 35-40%). They've moved into numerous financial segments. They had about $9 billion in revenue in 2017, and are nearing a billion users. The $150b valuation is rich, however it's about 1/3 to 1/4 the PE ratio that Amazon and Netflix are being given curre…
Why would a company with such massive revenue need to bring in so much external capital? Wouldn't the current stakeholders be better off keeping more of the pie?
Re: In Q2 2018, Global VC Scales Tipped In Favor Of Chinese Startups Over American
#7>>>In early June, news broke that Ant Financial, an electronic payments service company affiliated with Alibaba, had raised a staggering $14 billion in what’s technically a Series C round. To date, it’s the largest venture funding round in history. Led by Temasek Holdings and GIC (a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund), the round reportedly values Ant Financial at $150 billion. For perspective, that’s roughly twice Ube…
Ant Financial is handling ~$4 trillion in payment processing annually. They have about half of the Chinese mobile payments market in Alipay (WeChat has something like 35-40%). They've moved into numerous financial segments. They had about $9 billion in revenue in 2017, and are nearing a billion users. The $150b valuation is rich, however it's about 1/3 to 1/4 the PE ratio that Amazon and Netflix are being given curre…
Ant Financial has been involved in some very dodgy crowd funding schemes (though it is definitely the least dodgy of the bunch), the government has a right to be weary of them.
Re: In Q2 2018, Global VC Scales Tipped In Favor Of Chinese Startups Over American
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ant Financial is handling ~$4 trillion in payment processing annually. They have about half of the Chinese mobile payments market in Alipay (WeChat has something like 35-40%). They've moved into numerous financial segments. They had about $9 billion in revenue in 2017, and are nearing a billion users. The $150b valuation is rich, however it's about 1/3 to 1/4 the PE ratio that Amazon and Netflix are being given curre…
Why would a company with such massive revenue need to bring in so much external capital? Wouldn't the current stakeholders be better off keeping more of the pie?
Keep in mind $9 billion in sales is not quite massive revenue in the pool that Ant is now swimming. Their financial footing is not nearly so large as their scale of processing, they've only begun generating meaningful profit in the last year or two. Google is at $110 billion in sales, JP Morgan is at $94 billion, those are massive.
The dilution of current stakeholders is intentional. I believe it was required by Chinese authorities (my speculation).
I've been following Ant / Alipay with curiosity ever since Jack Ma stole it from Softbank and Yahoo (along with the rest of Alibaba shareholders). There have been a lot of bizarre things done with the company over time. Jack Ma for example gave himself the large majority share of ownership in the spun off entity, and then proceeded to voluntarily debase his ownership dramatically with no compensation. And now, having screwed Alibaba over with the Ant Financial spin out, Alibaba was recently forced by Jack Ma to buy a chunk of Ant again (33% of it).
My guess on some of these choices, is that it's about nationalism (taking Ant away from foreign owners of Alibaba) and the requirement by Chinese authorities that Jack Ma not have too much power (and that Ant's ownership not be so concentrated in general). If he had held onto the stolen position in Ant Financial + his stake in Alibaba, he'd be closing in on the world's richest person title (~$100b in Ant, ~$30b in Alibaba + cash). That's a spotlight you do not want right now if you're under Xi. I'm certain the Chinese authorities do not want one person owning the majority control of something like Ant Financial, given its size and importance to the economy. There's no other rational reason for Ma to have voluntarily given up so much ownership in Ant, he's shrinking himself as a target (plausibly he was given no choice; I suspect it was always the plan from the moment Ant was taken from Alibaba).
Or put it simply: Ant may end up being worth several hundred billion dollars. Imagine Jack Ma owning 2/3 of something worth $400 billion. Now picture the target on his back, that would go along with such power and control over the Chinese economy. It'd be Jack Ma vs Xi, and Jack Ma would lose; a very dangerous game to play if you're a simple civilian. Better to stay smaller and get to continue doing what you want to do (operate Alibaba and Ant), by giving up some power, ownership, and not being in any way perceived as a meaningful threat to the authorities and their absolute control.
Re: In Q2 2018, Global VC Scales Tipped In Favor Of Chinese Startups Over American
#9>>>In early June, news broke that Ant Financial, an electronic payments service company affiliated with Alibaba, had raised a staggering $14 billion in what’s technically a Series C round. To date, it’s the largest venture funding round in history. Led by Temasek Holdings and GIC (a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund), the round reportedly values Ant Financial at $150 billion. For perspective, that’s roughly twice Ube…
China is going cashless -mobile payments are increasingly the norm. There are two main ways to pay with your phone wechat pay and Alipay(run by ant financial). It will potentially handle a huge percentage of ALL payments in a country as big as china.Maybe 150bn isn't such a crazy valuation
How rapidly are cashless transactions spreading in China? When I was there back in 2011-2012 everything was exclusively cash-only. I'd be interested to learn the rate of change in recent years.
Re: In Q2 2018, Global VC Scales Tipped In Favor Of Chinese Startups Over American
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ant Financial is handling ~$4 trillion in payment processing annually. They have about half of the Chinese mobile payments market in Alipay (WeChat has something like 35-40%). They've moved into numerous financial segments. They had about $9 billion in revenue in 2017, and are nearing a billion users. The $150b valuation is rich, however it's about 1/3 to 1/4 the PE ratio that Amazon and Netflix are being given curre…
Ant Financial has been involved in some very dodgy crowd funding schemes (though it is definitely the least dodgy of the bunch), the government has a right to be weary of them.
Any source? I'm genuinely interested