Above: Online marketplace Taobao.com is China's everything store.
Investors were concerned with the scant details ecommerce giant Alibaba Group provided when filing for its initial public offering, so the company has returned with an amended filing chockfull of info. The document includes sales figures for its two main shopping sites, Taobao and Tmall, as well as a list of the 27 people who control more than half of the company’s board nominations.
This is the first time the Hangzhou, China-based company has released sales figures for Taobao and Tmall.
Taobao, a marketplace selling everything from children’s clothing to a trip to space, managed $177 billion in transactions last year, while Tmall, a spin-off of Taobao that hosts retailers and brands, only wrangled $70 billion. To put those numbers in perspective, Amazon did about $100 billion in transactions last year, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Also worth noting is Tmall’s growth over the last year. In the course of a year, Tmall’s transaction volume increased 90% to roughly $22 billion. In contrast, Taobao’s transactions only grew 32% to about $47 billion.
Alibaba also divulged the names of the 27 members who hold sway over board member nominations. Of those, 22 are from company management like CEO Jonathan Lu and executive chairman Jack Ma; four are executives from financial affiliate Small and Micro Financial; and one executive is from China Smart Logistics — a logistics company that Alibaba created in partnership with other Internet retailers.
Currently, Lu and Ma sit on the board, in addition to executive vice chairman Joseph Tsai and chief operating officer Daniel Zhang. Other members include the former chief executive of Hong Kong, Tung Chee-hwa; former Alibaba.com audit committee chairman, Walter Teh Ming Kwuak; former senior vice president of Goldman Sachs, J. Michael Evans; and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. Yahoo’s chief development officer, Jacqueline Reses, will resign from the board according to the filing. She’s been on the board since December 2012.
Right now, Alibaba is answering questions from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has to sign off on the IPO’s filing before its release. Alibaba’s IPO, which should happen in the next couple of months, is expected to be one of the biggest in U.S. history and could raise over $20 billion dollars for the company.
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Alibaba.com is a B2B e-commerce company. Alibaba's primary business is to serve as a directory of Chinese manufacturers connecting them to other companies around the world looking for suppliers. According to iResearch, it was the lar... read more »
