Shareholders in Alibaba.com (HKG:1688), the business trading platform belonging to Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, have approved the proposal privatization put forward by the company back in February.
An Alibaba statement issued after this afternoon’s extraordinary general meeting explains:
Approximately 95 percent of the shares held by independent shareholders voting in person or by proxy were voted in favor of the privatization and a majority of the shareholders voting in person or by proxy on a headcount basis also voted in favor of the privatization.
Maggie Wu, CFO and executive director of Alibaba.com, pictured at the shareholders meeting and vote this afternoon. (Click to enlarge)
And so Alibaba.com’s shareholders will receive the agreed upon cancellation price of HK$13.50 per share in cash. After that nearly unanimous approval, the next step will be getting the approval of the Grand Court of the Cayman Islands – yay for tax havens, huh – before, the company hopes, becoming a private company on June 19 and thereby delisting from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Earlier this week, Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) and Alibaba reached an agreement over the Chinese e-tailer buying back 20 percent of Yahoo’s stake. Just yesterday we heard rumors that the massive sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp (CIC) was seeking a $2 billion stake in Alibaba via an issuance of preferred shares – something that would sure help with the proposed repurchase from Yahoo, which will cost just over $7 billion.
Some analysts expect that a more consolidated and centralized Alibaba Group – replete with privatized B2C portal Alibaba.com, and with Yahoo having a much smaller stake – might go for a massive IPO at some point later. But the Yahoo buyback won’t be complete for another six months, so it could only happen after all that.
Alibaba runs China’s largest B2B, B2C (Tmall), C2C (Taobao) e-commerce sites, and the nation’s largest online payment platform, Alipay.
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