Yahoo! is set to subscribe to $100 million worth of shares in Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba.com.The search engine, which currently owns 39 per cent of the firm's parent organisation the Alibaba Group, is planning to purchase ten per cent of Alibaba.com's shares when the company puts them in a Hong Kong listing, according to a term sheet seen by Dow Jones Newswires.
Alibaba.com is hoping to raise up to £1 billion in the Initial Public Offering (IPO), ahead of a listing on Hong Kong's stock exchange.
Of the 858.9 million shares to be sold by the company, 75 per cent are reserved for global investors, 15 per cent for Hong Kong retail investors and ten per cent for Yahoo!, Reuters reports.
Alibaba.com is scheduled to launch its global share offering on October 15th, with its listing on the Hong Kong bourse anticipated to take place a few weeks later on November 6th.
According to MarketWatch, analysts who attended a pre-marketing briefing cited the IPO underwriters as saying that some of the proceeds of the share sale would be invested in the Alibaba Group's other businesses, including consumer-to-consumer unit Taobao.com.
China-based Alibaba.com operates both internationally and domestically using the internet to assist manufacturers in locating potential buyers for their products.
It does so by providing a platform to facilitate e-commerce between buyers and sellers around the world.
