America's Road to Fame

Chapter 361 A $200 Billion Valuation?
This time I came to Shanghai, on the one hand, to carry out adaptive training here, and on the other hand, Ivanta has brought their daughter Anna to Shanghai. After William Chen accompanied Nozomi Sasaki for a period of time, So I came to Huaguo to accompany Ivanta mother and daughter.

But not long after he arrived in Shanghai, Boss Ma came here to look for him.

At present, Alibaba Cloud is already providing internal services, and the performance is satisfactory. Therefore, it is going to be officially launched immediately, open to the public, and provide cloud services.

Alibaba Cloud cooperated with Meta Cloud in the process of research and development, and Chen William also invested in it, occupying 20% ​​of Alibaba Cloud's shares, but this part of the shareholding is not through the Meta Group, but Chen William Shareholdings by Future Group in the Asia region.

After all, although Meta Cloud is mainly aimed at the overseas market of Huaguo, it is also a product in the same field as Alibaba Cloud. Therefore, it is not so suitable for Meta Group to hold shares in Alibaba Cloud, and Boss Ma will not be willing to let the future potential competitors to hold shares.

Now the Meta Group is already an asset of the Kettering Foundation on the surface, and it is not directly held by William Chen. Therefore, it is reasonable to use the Future Group to hold shares in Alibaba Cloud.

And to be honest, Boss Ma developed Alibaba Cloud at this time mainly to solve Taobao's server problems. Although the "Double 11" event was very successful, before that time, the pressure that Ali's servers needed to face still made Ma The boss is determined to develop Alibaba Cloud so that they can flexibly provide server resources for e-commerce.

Chen William naturally knew that investing in Alibaba Cloud would be a good deal. After all, he only invested 3 million U.S. dollars in it, and together with joint research and development in technology, he got 20% of Alibaba Cloud's shares. Later, the company The company's valuation will approach $1000 billion.

But Boss Ma didn't know this. To be honest, he was very grateful to William Chen for investing in Alibaba Cloud's research and development.Because when Alibaba Cloud was being developed, starting from 2008, there were no results in the previous nearly three years, but it required continuous investment from Alibaba.

This made other departments of Alibaba have a lot of opinions. At one point, they even directly questioned Boss Ma whether the so-called cloud computing is impossible to succeed.

At the end of last year, under various pressures, it was even rumored that Alibaba Cloud would be abolished. At the time of the annual meeting, Dr. Wang Jian gave a speech with tears in his eyes.

In fact, this is not even a speech. After he came to the stage, he couldn't cry, but said with a choked voice: "I have been scolded more in the past two years than I have been scolded in my entire life. However, I don't regret it. It's just that before I came on stage, I saw Several colleagues, they used to be in Alibaba Cloud, but they are not in Alibaba Cloud now..."

After that, Boss Ma publicly stood up and said: "I invest 10 billion in Alibaba Cloud every year for ten years, and let's talk about it if I can't do it."

How much pressure did the Alibaba Cloud department face at that time?In William Chen’s previous life, Dr. Wang Jian recalled Alibaba Cloud’s entrepreneurial history when he was invited to participate in the “Long Reader” program, and said calmly: “Alibaba Cloud was bought by life.”

It was at this time that William Chen proposed to Boss Ma that he would cooperate with Alibaba to develop Alibaba Cloud and invest 3 million US dollars in Alibaba Cloud in exchange for 20% of the shares.

At this time, Alibaba Cloud has invested less than US$3 million in the past three years, which shows that William Chen’s valuation of Alibaba Cloud is more than US$15 billion.

This also strengthened Boss Ma's confidence in developing Aliyun, and agreed to William Chen's investment.

Now, Alibaba Cloud has finally succeeded. After completing the carrying of Alibaba's internal business, it will be released to the public soon.

But this time Boss Ma came to William Chen, the main thing was not about Alibaba Cloud.

After listening to Boss Ma's words, William Chen knew that he already had the idea of ​​delisting from HK.

At the end of 2007, Ali Company took its B2B business as the main body and successfully listed on the HK main board. At that time, it raised 116 billion Hong Kong dollars (about 17 billion US dollars).

However, since 2009, the stock performance of Ali B2B has begun to decline. Until recently, it has fallen to about 10 Hong Kong dollars, which is less than a quarter of its highest value.

This is why Chen William was able to buy 40% of Ali's shares from Yahoo for US$40 billion.Otherwise, based on its peak value in the early stage of listing in HK, the total market value of B2B business exceeded 200 billion US dollars, and Yahoo would not have agreed to sell Ali shares at that price. That is, the subprime mortgage crisis and the sluggish share price of Ali could make Chen William succeeded in bargain hunting.

Now, Alibaba’s business is ready to transform. It mainly focuses on Taobao and the newly launched Tmall Mall, plus other businesses including Alipay and Alibaba Cloud. Its B2B business is no longer the most important business. The current downturn Share prices can even drag down overall valuations.

After all, Boss Ma also plans to package the entire Alibaba Group for listing, but the premise is to carry out AB shares, that is, to use the less than 10% of Ali shares he currently holds to complete the control of the Ali Group through the same shares with different rights. .

However, the HK exchange does not support AB shares. There is a high probability that if Ali Group goes public, it will still choose the United States. Therefore, privatizing Ali’s B2B business in advance and delisting from HK can also pave the way for the overall listing in the future.

Therefore, Boss Ma believes that it is necessary to communicate with Ali's major shareholder Chen William in advance about this matter.

William Chen has no objection to this at all. He knows that Ali's HK listing is actually profitable for Ali itself.

Therefore, according to Boss Ma's plan, the privatization and delisting will be carried out at a stock price of 13.5 Hong Kong dollars, which is a nearly 35% premium over the current stock price.

But you must know that when Ali’s B2007B business was listed in HK in 2, the issue price of the stock was 13.5 Hong Kong dollars. From this point of view, after turning around, Ali now takes back the tradable shares of the HK exchange at a price of 13.5 Hong Kong dollars. It is equivalent to the US$17 billion raised in its listing in HK, which was spent for a few years and then returned without paying interest.

After talking about this matter, what Boss Ma said next is interesting. He told William Chen that some companies in Huaguo are also interested in investing in Ali. % Ali company shares.

Uh, it’s interesting. In his previous life, Boss Ma did a similar operation before Alibaba went public in the US, but at that time he bought half of Yahoo’s shares, that is, 70% of the shares, at a price of US$20 billion.

This time it may be because William Chen is different from Yahoo in his previous life. At that time, Yahoo was very dissatisfied with Ali because of the split of Alipay. Control is stronger.

And now William Chen and Boss Ma have been cooperating well, but Boss Ma still seems to be cautious. Even so, he is worried that William Chen holds as much as 40% of the shares of Alibaba.

After all, in his view, in the field of e-commerce, William Chen holds shares in Zoom in the United States and Jingdong in Huaguo; in the field of payment, he also has PayPal; even in the field of cloud computing recently, he has Meta Cloud.

It can be said that in many fields of Ali Company, there are competitors, or the holdings of potential competitors in the future, or it is his company at all...

Therefore, although Boss Ma didn't want to kick the opponent out of Ali as he did to Yahoo in his previous life, he still wanted to take back part of William Chen's shares first, so that he could be in a safer position.

And his bid this time, compared to the previous $70 billion purchase of Yahoo's 20% Ali shares, with $50 billion to buy 10% of William Chen's shares, it can be said that the price is higher.

At the beginning, William Chen bought all 40% of Ali shares, but only spent 40 billion US dollars. Now, Boss Ma’s bid is equivalent to the valuation of the total value of William Chen’s holdings at 200 billion US dollars, and he bought it directly. five times the price.

If it was someone else's price, I'm afraid they would agree to it in one bite.

However, William Chen knows that the market value of Alibaba after its listing in the future will reach a maximum of US$8500 billion. Even if William Chen’s shareholding ratio is reduced to about 35% due to the additional issuance at that time, it will be nearly US$3000 billion. Wealth, so it is certainly impossible for him to give up this part of his shares at a total valuation of 200 billion US dollars.

(End of this chapter)