Alibaba’s Silence Isn’t Golden For its I.P.O

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Brokerdealer.com blog extract below courtesy of June 10 WSJ Aaron Back reporting.

Jack Ma, executive chairman of Alibaba. European Pressphoto Agency

Jack Ma, executive chairman of Alibaba. European Pressphoto Agency

As Alibaba Group prepares for the bright lights of Broadway, it is keeping potential investors in the dark. There is yet time to illuminate things.

The Chinese online-shopping giant is likely to release an updated regulatory filing soon in preparation for an initial public offering in New York, expected to raise more than $20 billion. A pre-IPO document released in May left gaping holes around Alibaba’s business and who controls it.

It seems a bare minimum to identify the more than two dozen partners who will effectively control Alibaba via special rights to appoint a majority of board members. The nature of these partners’ business relationships with Alibaba also should be known. It was a big oversight that the initial filing omitted this information. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the names of the partners will be included in the updated filing.

In addition, investors have complained that Alibaba didn’t break down results for its two moneymaking retail sites, Taobao and Tmall. Last month’s filing emphasized the importance of the Tmall business in the mix of the two. Faster Tmall growth means more revenue per item shipped. A higher Tmall contribution also would bode well for the transition to mobile devices, where it is harder to sell ads.

BrokerDealer Credit Suisse Back in the IPO Business

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Brokerdealer.com/blog news extract below courtesy of  June 10 WSJ and reporters Telis Demis and Evelyn Rusi

The chinos are gone. So is the sprawling Silicon Valley hub.

facing eastBut more than a decade after its fall from the peak of the dot-com-banking business, Credit Suisse Group AG CSGN.VX -0.33% is at the helm of some of the sector’s biggest deals.

The bank is one of the lead managers of the expected $20 billion-plus initial public offering for Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the Chinese online shopping and e-commerce giant.

Credit Suisse also helped lead IPOs for Weibo Corp. WB +1.39% , which operates a Twitter TWTR +2.61% -like service, and online cosmetics retailer Jumei International Holding Ltd. JMEI +0.82% , earlier this year.

Credit Suisse’s climb back in tech banking began with a Starbucks SBUX -0.77% -fueled brainstorming session in 2010 between Jim Amine, the firm’s global head of investment banking, and David Wah, global head of technology banking Continue reading →

GoDaddy to Tap Public Markets for IPO

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BrokerDealer.com blog extends thanks to NYT DealBook for below news extract.

GoDaddy, the domain name registration giant, plans to sell its shares to investors in an initial public offering.

Courtesy of NYT DealBook

Courtesy of NYT DealBook

The company, which filed a prospectus with regulators on Monday, is preparing to tap the public markets about two-and-a-half years after it was bought by a group led by the private equity firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Silver Lake. GoDaddy previously sought to go public in 2006, but a deal never materialized at that time.

GoDaddy allows individuals and small businesses to set up Internet domain names, offering services like website building, hosting and security. The company had 57 million domains under management as of Dec. 31. It generates the majority of what it calls bookings — gross sales before refunds — from sales of domain names.

K.K.R. and Silver Lake, along with the venture capital firm Technology Crossover Ventures, paid about $2.25 billion for GoDaddy in December 2011. The company plans to use some of the money raised in the I.P.O. to reduce its debt.

It also plans to make a $25 million payment to its private equity and venture capital owners, to terminate an agreement under which the owners have collected fees.

For the full story, please visit NYT DealBook article.

BrokerDealers and Billionaire Clients: Who are YOU Goin’ To Call?

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If you’re an aspiring billionaire, or the real thing, it won’t surprise you to know there is lots of competition among brokerdealers for your big account. Find the right broker-dealer, and the right individual broker who can be trusted to provide good guidance, and you can take two items off of your check list.

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times.Thorne Perkin, a wealth adviser, said the young tech group was not to be ignored.

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times.Thorne Perkin, a wealth adviser, said the young tech group was not to be ignored.

Searching for a broker to manage your bucks (or yen, or euros, or maybe your bitcoin fortune)??.. Today’s article from the NYT Dealbook is worth your read….here are some extracts:

When Microsoft went public in 1986, its chief executive and largest shareholder, Bill Gates, wound up with a broker at Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street firm that had led the company’s initial public offering.

The San Francisco broker, William Hobi, was so excited to have Mr. Gates as a client that he put a vanity license plate on his Porsche for a few years with the letters MSFT, the trading symbol for the company’s stock.

Times may have changed, but technology billionaires still set the engines racing among Silicon Valley brokers. Social media I.P.O.s, including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, and acquisitions like Facebook’s planned $18 billion purchase of WhatsApp have created more than a dozen billionaires, by one count of Forbes magazine data.

Competition to handle their money is intense. “Every day I get a connection request from a wealth manager on LinkedIn,” said Michael Cagney, the founder and chief executive of Social Finance, or SoFi, an online student-loan platform in San Francisco that might go public in the next year or two. Mr. Cagney sold another financial software company, Finaplex, in 2007 and runs a hedge fund. Continue reading →

Uber Snags $1.2Bil in Funding at $17Bil Valuation: Deal Investors Drive Record Raise for Car-Ride Service

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A BrokerDealer.com/blog special:

Bankers, Broker-Dealers, venture and private equity investors, and the universe of fast-growth start-ups who keep an eye on the pulse of pre-IPO funding rounds were salivating on Friday after Uber, the car ride service, announced it raised $1.2bil from “institutional investors, mutual funds, private equity and venture capital,” with a second round of investors coming soon. The new round of financing values the company at a total $18.2 billion. The company’s pre-money valuation, not counting the latest round of funding, was $17 billion.

Investors hope the company, which allows users to summon a ride on their smartphones, can expand globally and diversify into logistics.
The investors in the round valued Uber “pre-money” at $17 billion, the blog post said. The $1.2 billion infusion took the startup’s valuation to $18.2 billion.

Fidelity Investments put in about $425 million, Wellington Management added $209 million and BlackRock Inc contributed $175 million, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Venture firms Summit Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures and Menlo Ventures also participated in the round, a person familiar with the matter said. Kleiner’s investment came from its Digital Growth Fund, run by former stock analyst Mary Meeker, known for her bullish recommendations during the first dot-com boom. Her fund has had recent hits, including traffic app Waze, acquired last year for $1.1 billion by Google.

“Uber is one of the most rapidly growing companies ever, and we believe there are opportunities for continued tremendous growth,” Joan Miller, a spokeswoman for Summit Partners, an investor in the funding round, said by telephone.Uber, which did not give details about its latest investors, operates in 128 cities across 37 countries.

Kalanick said he expected to close a second round of funding from strategic investors of about $200 million