|
Alibaba Group has filed for IPO on Tuesday that could exceed the USD 16 billion raised by Facebook in 2012. "This is going to be the granddaddy of all IPOs," predicted Sam Hamedah, CEO of PrivCo, which researches major privately held corporations. Last year, 231 million customers bought a total of USD 248 billion in merchandise on Alibaba's e-commerce sites, according to the IPO documents. About USD 37 billion, or 15 per cent, of that volume came through mobile devices. Most of Alibaba is currently owned by four shareholders: Japan's SoftBank Corp., with 34 per cent stake; Yahoo, with 23 per cent; former CEO and co-founder Jack Ma with 8.9 per cent; and vice chairman and co-founder Joseph Tsai with 3.6 per cent.
