BIZCHINA / Company Events

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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