Chinese ecommerce giant Aliaba Group is said to seek up to US$ 4 billion in debt financing to buy back the 40% stake in Alibaba which is currently held by Yahoo.
Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba made up of huge portion of the company’s market cap which according to some analysts could worth up to US$ 9 billion. Alibaba founder and CEO Jack Ma recently said at an industry event that he would be “very interested” in buying Yahoo while Alibaba was reportedly prepared to make a bid. News had it that Alibaba and Japan’s Softbank were negotiating with some PEs about offering a concerted bid, including Blackstone Group LP (BX) and Bain Capital LLC.
Yahoo is now undergoing a strategic restructure that the company has intention to get rid of its valuable yet remote Asia properties party because there’s minor chance to achieve synergy between the properties in and out of its homeland. However, by selling its stake in Alibaba would incur a huge tax bill, so a BusinessInsider article said that Alibaba wanted to buy Hulu and then trade it to Yahoo for the latter’s Alibaba stake, in which case Yahoo can cash out its stakes without paying too much tax and Alibaba can finally buy back its shares. It’s just, it seems that Hulu’s parent company hasn’t deciding on a sellout yet.