The money-go-round gets confusing

See if you can work this out: Yahoo!, which owns 39% of Alibaba Group is, according to Dow Jones, going to invest $100 million in the Alibaba.com IPO. Now, as we reported earlier, 73.5% of the listed stock will belong to Alibaba Group. Now, unless I'm being thick (always possible), that means that $28.665 million of that effectively goes straight back into Yahoo!'s control.

On another piece of idle speculation, what betting that the offer price is HK$8.88? They have been reportedly looking to raise US$1 billion for a while. The leaked term sheets are talking of selling 858.9 million shares. That equates to US$1.164 per share which comes out at HK$9.00. Investors will love $8.88.

Watch out, your term sheets are slipping

A Dow Jones piece from Hong Kong claims to be based on a leaked copy of the Alibaba IPO term sheet. Highlights:

• Alibaba, it says, will sell 858.9 million shares, equivalent to 17% of its business-to-business unit's enlarged share capital.
• Only 26.5% of the shares in the IPO is new stock not traded privately before the offering.
• The rest, therefore, comes from Alibaba Group which will use the proceeds to develop its newer, unlisted businesses such as Taobao.
  
• The global share offering will be launched on Oct. 15, with the listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange expected Nov. 6.
• Revenues are expected to be Rmb2.03 billion (US270 million) with net profits jumping 74% to Rmb622 million (US$82 million).
  

Not everything listed on the Alibaba sites (or, to be fair, other similar ones) are quite what they claim to be. In six days time, we'll know whether this was based on an authentic Ali-term sheet won't we.

XFML ties us in knots

My colleague Mark Cochrane has been struggling manfully for the past two weeks or so to keep up with the twists and turns of developments of Xinhua Finance and its NASDAQ-listed subsidiary Xinhua Finance Media. Friday, we decided to push ahead and publish the report on which he'd been working for our Asia Business Media Tracker service. I think he's done a great job on untangling the rather complicated web of events and businesses.

Inevitably, however, Saturday's FT sees a report of a major new development there: the sale of the Glass Lewis shareholder advisory firm for $46 million. The report notes that the company bought Glass Lewis just a few months ago for $45 million. I fear that the $1 million 'profit' will just about cover the transaction costs...if they're lucky.

XFL Founder and CEO Fredy Bush is quoted as saying “We believe this transaction is in the best interests of both Xinhua Finance’s shareholders as well as Glass Lewis employees and clients.” I'm sure they'll feel happy to see that water flowing under the bridge and get on with running what is, in my opinion, one of the best business information operations in the region.

Facebook for events?

I have written about Facebook and Asia's media industry a couple of times (most recently here). To be honest, I remain unclear whether it has any value beyond the truly social and amusing. It's certainly an addictive interface.

The now very occasional TSMI's Trade Show Marketing Report blog reports on a Facebook app (widget) directly aimed at events. It notes that Event Connector "is basically a widget that announces to the world that you're going to some event and will compile a list of friends and friends of friends on Facebook who have also stated their intent to attend the same event. You can also place the widget on TypePad and Blogger blogs".

Along with the blogger, I am a bit sceptical of this impact of this on mainstream trade shows. But, heh, who knows?

Update: this is obviously on other people's minds too. An interesting post here on the Web 2.0 Asia blog with some experience from Korea which pre-dates MySpace or Facebook.

Next hurdle safely cleared

This blog is becoming a bit of a one trick pony with its slightly obsessive focus on Alibaba's IPO. However no apologies for that: it will certainly be by far the largest ever B2B IPO in Asia along with a rash of other superlatives that I'm sure we'll be hearing more of in the coming days.

Anyway, on to the point of the post: today's South China Morning Post (and, I think it really is them this time, not Bloomberg) reports the following:

• Alibaba "secured in-principle approval from the Hong Kong stock exchange yesterday for a US$1 billion initial public offering".
• The company was asked to submit additional information to the stock exchange's Listing Committee because "the committee was concerned that Alibaba might face internal competition in the search engine marketing business".
• The expectation of a listing some time this month is repeated.
  

Reuters targeting Indian farmers

We wrote just the other day about Reuters advertising-supported India service. We thought that relying on advertising was probably smart in this market where getting subscribers outside a very limited market of high-end financial services users will be very tough.

No we see them taking a different approach with the launch of a mobile information service for Indian farmers "Reuters Market Light". The press release notes that "Successfully trialled since April 2007, the service already has over 7,500 farmers signed-up and is being actively supported by The Government of India". It adds "Reuters will be developing Reuters Market Light, from an information service, to a full mobile news, information and price facilitator".

The trial in Maharashtra was free. The company is now going to try a monthly fee of Rs60 (US$1.50). It will be interesting to see how many of those 7,500 keep going and how many sign up from other places. A very interesting test of the mobile business information concept in a challenging, developing market.

Running like a Swiss watch

Our good friends at Alibaba, not content with all the excitement of the impending IPO, are now setting their sights on Europe and have opened a new office....in Switzerland. The Tribune de Genève reports Vice President Kenneth Liu saying "Europe is already one of the biggest markets for the company “and I see the day coming where a major share of trading in Europe will take place on our website”". Nothing short of ambitious these guys.

12 employees in Geneva will cover "key customers targeted in Britain, Italy, France, Turkey, Germany and Dubai" the report says. Lucky them. Nice place. Not cheap!

Ali-IPO "this month"

Somebody at the South China Morning Post appears to be confident in their belief that Alibaba's IPO will take place this month. Although the plan to make a Hong Kong listing is public knowledge, the exact timing has been a closely-guarded secret. But a Business Post 'fluff' piece (i.e. not real news and sorry, the link's only good for subscribers) on Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack says the following:

Mr Mack was determined to make Alibaba the centrepiece of Morgan Stanley's drive to become No1 for the first time in the market for initial public offerings in Hong Kong.

When Alibaba raises US$1 billion this month, it will be at least the 10th non-state mainland public offering arranged by the world's second-largest securities firm this year, bringing Morgan Stanley's share of the market to about 25 per cent, more than its two competitors combined.

That seems pretty clear. Surely, the Morgan Stanley PR people who placed the article didn't slip up and reveal the timing did they?

Correction: Somebody at Bloomberg appears to be confident in the date being this month. That story is popping up all over the place (e.g in Australia and here's the Bloomberg original).

B2B web sites - where to look for 'real' data

Regular readers will know that we've written on the topic of the inadequacies of our reliance on Alexa.com ratings (most recently here, back in April). The main problem we have is that really don't see any better alternatives.

The China Web 2.0 Review blog has an interesting post today on this topic. It talks about the potential to use search engines to compare web sites' popularity. The basic principle appears to be that the more times people have searched for a particular site would indicate (a) that it is more popular than others and (b) that its traffic may be comparably higher. Those who rank poorly on these tests would, of course, argue that it's simply because those doing the searches are not regular users and that may be a fair point.

The article refers to Baidu Index, Google Trends and Yahoo Buzz. Play around with them. I got some interesting results which not be entirely popular everywhere.

"Auntie" buys Lonely Planet

This isn't really a business media story, but it caught my eye and it's a holiday here today anyway, so travel-related tales are de rigeur. There are few organisations in the world associated with the staid establishment than the BBC. There are few publishers which have captured counter-culture chic and made scads of money out of it than Lonely Planet.

So, imagine our surprise to see that BBC Worldwide has bought 75% of the offbeat guidebooks company from founders Tony and Maureen Wheeler. The Asian twist here is that the company is headquartered in Melbourne.