Bottom line: Ant Financial’s valuation looks low but reasonable based on its first major fund raising, and the figure is like to triple or more by the time it makes its domestic IPO in around the next 2 years.
Ant Financial gets low valuation in new funding
After months of negotiations, Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) affiliated financial services unit Ant Financial has finally closed its first major funding round as it revs up a campaign to challenge established state-run banks. But what most surprised me in the latest reports were the low valuation that Ant got from the funding, with the final figure coming in far below all of the earlier forecasts.
The moral of the story is that Ant Financial and other similar privately funded financial services companies still have big potential. But limitations that restrict such companies from seeking foreign investment are likely to limit their valuations, since only a small field of domestic Chinese institutional investors have big enough sums of money to finance high-growth companies like Ant. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: China needs to let traditional banks behave more independently and encourage them to take risks, or risk seeing them overtaken by private, entrepreneurial financial companies.
Alibaba bank goes online
China’s 2 leading e-commerce companies were in the headlines last week with major new moves in the financial services sector, continuing a trend that has seen private firms pose the first serious challenge in decades to China’s banking establishment. One move saw Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) launch its online bank, MYbank, as part of a Beijing pilot program to allow private companies into the sector. The other saw JD.com (Nasdaq: JD) form a credit scoring joint venture, aiming to tap its huge volumes of transaction data to help rate the creditworthiness of individuals. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Alibaba’s technical glitch at Alipay, the launch of its new bank and use of its Taobao platform to auction of bad loans reflect its growing clout in financial services, as it attempts to build up its Ant Financial unit for a future IPO.
Technical glitch interrupts Alipay
E-commerce leader Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) is in a trio of finance-related headlines, spotlighting its growing bet on financial services that could be a huge growth area as Beijing opens the sector to private investment. One headline has seen Alibaba get official permission from its home province to open a bank, after it became one of the first 3 entities to receive private banking licenses under a pilot program by Beijing.
The second headline has seen the company’s popular Alipay electronic payments service experience technical problems that cut off access for 2 hours earlier this week, prompting it to quickly say that no accounts were compromised. The final news bit comes in a larger story about China’s growing bad asset crisis, which will see the nation’s top bad asset management company use Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace to auction off some of those assets. Read Full Post…
In a sign of just how overheated M&A in China’s tech sector has become, 2 major purchases by e-commerce giant Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) and online travel leader Ctrip (Nasdaq: CTRP) are receiving scant attention from investors, even though they are worth nearly $1 billion combined. Instead, the big news grabber is another headline involving Alibaba, with word that the world’s second largest Internet firm has just become one of a handful of private Chinese companies to win new private sector banking licenses being awarded by Beijing. That development will see Alibaba and several partners open an Internet-based bank that will cater to smaller savers and borrowers, an area often neglected by the current field of big state-run lenders. Read Full Post…
