Alibaba targets search market, eyes IPO
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-05-18 09:07
China's Alibaba.com, whose biggest shareholder is Yahoo Inc, aims to hold an
initial public offering, but has no timetable yet for listing its shares,
chairman and founder Jack Ma said on Wednesday.
Ma, who is an outspoken Chinese Internet pioneer rarely given to
understatement, said his ambition, a decade from now, is to make his company one
of the world's top three most powerful Internet companies and a Global Fortune
500 company.
"Like GE, Microsoft or IBM, we want to make Alibaba a company that can last
long and influence people," Ma told an audience of Wall Street investors,
analysts and news media at Yahoo's annual analyst day briefing in San Francisco.
"I think we will be a public company," Ma said but backed away from offering
any specific schedule. "Now there is so many things we need to do," he said,
adding as an aside that, "We have to fix Yahoo first, be the No. 1 search
engine."
Ma said he wants to introduce a new version of Yahoo search technology in
September. Market researchers say Yahoo is a distant No. 3 in the Chinese
market, behind market leader Baidu Inc., with roughly half the market, and
Google Inc. .
Yahoo invested $1 billion in Alibaba.com last August in return for a 40
percent stake.
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