China E-Commerce Giant Alibaba Now Bigger than Baidu, Reveals New Financials

China’s biggest e-commerce company, Alibaba Group, which runs sites like Taobao and Tmall, has revealed in a filing to the US SEC (see here) that its revenue rose 64 percent from last year to $805.9 million at the end of 2012 Q1.

Alibaba Group, Reuters points out, has now moved up to be China’s second-biggest web company by revenue. It’s behind the social and gaming efforts of Tencent (HKG:0700), but now ahead of Chinese search engine Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) which has been pushed down to third-largest.

Being a private company it doesn’t usually release quarterly figures, so these stats come via a filing by Yahoo, which owns 41.7 percent of Alibaba Group. The Chinese firm’s net profit for the same period jumped by a factor of six to $220.5 million. Nothing else related to the Hangzhou company was revealed.

Alibaba is currently raising as much as $8 billion so that it can go through with the Yahoo stake repurchase deal that it finally hammered out earlier this year. That’ll see Yahoo – now being steered by Marissa Mayer, formerly of Google – lose half its stake in Alibaba Group, being reduced to about 20 percent.

Many suspect that Alibaba Group, having recently privatized its Alibaba.com subsidiary, is aiming for the web’s biggest-ever IPO in a few years’ time.

[Source: Reuters]