Alibaba.com, China's leading e-commerce company, plans to go public later this year in Hong Kong or New York, in what could be the biggest initial public offering ever for a Chinese Internet company, according to some Hong Kong media reports.

Alibaba.com, which is controlled by the Alibaba Group and partly owned by Yahoo, could raise US$700 million to US$1billion, making the stock offering bigger than other high-flying Chinese Internet companies in recent years, including the search engine Baidu.com, which raised US$109 million, and Tencent.com, which runs the popular QQ instant messaging service.

But Alibaba refused to comment on these reports.

Three Wall Street investment banks - Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank - are advising Alibaba on the initial public offering, which would involve only Alibaba Group's biggest unit, Alibaba.com, a business-to-business site that helps entrepreneurs, suppliers and businesses from around the world find one another and buy and sell goods.

The offering could hatch another large public Internet company in China, a country that already has more than 137 million Internet users, second only to the United States. It is expected the shares will be offered overseas, most likely in Hong Kong or New York.

In 2005, Yahoo paid US$1 billion in cash for a 40 percent share of Alibaba and handed its China operations over to the Alibaba Group and its chairman and chief executive, Jack Ma, a former English teacher from Hangzhou, where Alibaba is based. At that time, the Alibaba Group was valued at about US$4 billion.

Other divisions of the Alibaba Group, like Taobao and the Yahoo China operations, will not be included in the stock offering. Those units will remain part of the currently privately-controlled Alibaba Group.

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