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[Elias]

Alibaba IPO won’t happen until next year
Oct. 4, 2013, 5:22 p.m. EDT · CORRECTED
By John Shinal

An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated that Alibaba hadn’t reported its results using GAAP. The column has been corrected.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. will not commence its initial public offering until next year, according to two people familiar with the company’s plans.

“These guys haven’t even hired bankers yet,” said one of the sources, who requested anonymity in exchange for the information.

The fast-growing Chinese e-commerce and auction firm has yet to make a final decision, between New York and Shanghai, on where it will list its shares, said the source, while adding that the company expects to do so soon.

The decision to do the deal next year may deliver a hit to the shares of Yahoo YHOO -0.55% , which owns about a quarter of Alibaba. Many Yahoo YHOO -0.55% investors seem to have been banking on an earlier deal. Yahoo shares surged 9% on July 17, when the U.S. online giant released financial data on its China investment. The stock is up more than 70% this year, and Alibaba underpins most analysts’ valuation estimates for the stock.

The data from July showed rapid growth for Alibaba in both sales and profit. Estimates for Alibaba’s performance typically lift Yahoo; Citigroup upped its price target on Yahoo earlier this week, citing rising valuation estimates for Alibaba as one key factor for the move.

Now, a later offering from Alibaba will force those investors to wait longer for their return, even as it clears the way for Twitter’s TWTR 0.00% investment bankers, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, to market the prospectus for its IPO, which became public on Thursday and could lead to an offering within the next month.

It also avoids the complication of forcing professional growth investors to choose between two blockbuster tech offerings coming to the public markets at the same time.

The South China Morning Post has reported that Alibaba will list in New York, either on the New York Stock Exchange or on the Nasdaq, but the sources for this story declined comment on that and all other questions.

Alibaba is much larger than Twitter. In its last earnings report in July, Yahoo disclosed that Alibaba had revenue of $1.38 billion in the March quarter of this year, with earnings of $669 million. In its prospectus disclosed on Thursday, Twitter showed revenues of $121 million for the June period, with a net loss of $42.2 million for the quarter.

Still, Alibaba will let Twitter clear out of the investment banks, stock brokers and other trading desks that will sell the new Twitter shares to institutional and retail investors in the U.S.

The dispute between Alibaba and officials of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, which torpedoed the company’s chance to raise money there this year, serves as a cautionary example of the bumpy road faced by companies that undertake the process of going public.

Still, if Alibaba does complete an offering next year, it likely will raise several times more than Twitter, as its latest sales growth rate was reported at 71% by Yahoo during that Internet company’s July earnings report.

Ultimately, Alibaba’s shares are likely to be received as warmly by U.S. investors who have generally welcomed IPOs from big Internet brands such as LinkedIn LNKD -0.20% , Yelp YELP +0.08% , Groupon GRPN -0.26% , Zynga ZNGA +2.45% and even Facebook FB -0.06% — all Internet startups that have gone public in the last two-and-a-half years. Those companies, which are collectively valued at about $150 billion, raised billions by finding eager U.S. money managers looking to invest in growth stories.

Some of those have been good investments, and some have not.

But this year, Silicon Valley’s tech investment bankers will be hoisting their so-called “lucites,” or trophies, based in part on how big a piece they got of the Twitter deal.

Note: the columnist has no position in any of the shares mentioned, long or short. Follow @johnshinal on Twitter .

John Shinal, a former technology editor of MarketWatch, is based in San Francisco.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/alibab ... 2013-10-04