Alibaba Dropping More Hints Of How Fast It's Growing

11 years, 1 month ago - March 07, 2013

Alibaba has been doing a dance of sorts as to the question of whether or not it’s going to IPO this year, next or in 2015. The official answer from the company, when asked, is that it’s not in the cards.

Yet rumors have been that the company is talking to its advisors since the end of the Chinese New Year on a possible IPO for the second half of this year.

The recent results of Alibaba’s growth in Q3 – which were reported in Yahoo‘s (YHOO) 10K filing made the sell-side more bullish on Alibaba’s value.

Barclay’s Anthony DiClemente said on Monday that Alibaba may be worth $55 billion in an IPO. Cantor Fitzgerald’s Youssef Squali said yesterday Alibaba may be worth up to $79 billion in an IPO.

For the record, I have long insisted that Alibaba would be valued at $64 billion in an IPO at the start of 2013 and $79 billion if the IPO was held closer to the end of this year.

The sell-side now seems to have religion on the sum of the part value of Yahoo. Both Cantor and Barclays raised their price targets to $26 this week. Last November — when Yahoo was trading at $17 — I laid out the sum-of-the parts reasoning for how Yahoo could go to $40 by the end of 2013. I guess it just took another 35% move in the stock to get the sell-side on board.

At the end of last week, Venturebeat published an infographic produced by Alibaba on how fast the Chinese e-commerce market is growing and how that’s benefiting Alibaba.

Here are some of the facts they included:

The Chinese e-commerce market will overtake the US e-commerce market in size this year
Chinese consumers will spend $265 billion on e-commerce this year
Alibaba Group sites like Tmall and Taobao sold $175 billion worth of products last year
Alibaba had one day last November when it sold $3 billion in goods on one day
Even though Chinese consumers make far less income than Americans, they spend on average almost exactly the same as Americans on e-commerce (just over $1000 a year)

Text by Forbes

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