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Two
of the biggest Internet companies in the world are going public in the
United States, but most Americans have never heard of Chinese
powerhouses Weibo Corp. and Alibaba.
Despite
both companies' lack of recognition in the U.S., they are poised to
make massive stock-market debuts in New York — and make a play to become
household names in America, too.
Sina Weibo
Weibo kicked off the buzz on Friday, when the company filed paperwork to raise $500 million in an initial public offering.
The
company owns Sina Weibo, China's largest microblogging site. Sina Weibo
is similar to Twitter, with short posts from brands, celebrities and
regular folks.
The site has
managed to grow rapidly — the service had more than 129 million active
users as of December, up 77 percent in just two years — despite a
tightly controlled media environment in China. Hundreds of Weibo users
have reportedly been arrested in China over posts that angered the
government.
Sina Weibo does have a
small English-language section featuring celebrity users like David
Beckham, Tom Cruise and British Prime Minister David Cameron.
Sina
Weibo is still big and buzzy, but it has also struggled to retain its
cachet amid the rise of apps like Tencent's WeChat: a rival to the WhatsApp service that Facebook is planning to buy for $16 billion.
Alibaba: China's Amazon, eBay, PayPal and more
E-commerce
behemoth Alibaba Group is more difficult to describe. It has been
described as China's Amazon, eBay and PayPal wrapped into one. But
Alibaba isn't a perfect mirror of any of those U.S. counterparts, and
its scope is much broader.
Alibaba
followed Sina Weibo's news by revealing its own plans on Sunday: a New
York debut that could reportedly raise $15 billion for the company.
While Alibaba hasn't filed its official paperwork yet, its stock-market
debut is slated to be the buzziest since that of Facebook.
The company said in its announcement on
Sunday that the U.S. IPO "will make us a more global company and
enhance the company’s transparency, as well as allow the company to
continue to pursue our long-term vision and ideals."
Alibaba
employs about 20,000 people in more than 70 offices in China,
Singapore, India and the United States. The company's nine major
businesses span all parts of the e-commerce process, and they're split
between consumer- and business-focused missions.
On
the consumer side, Alibaba's crown jewel is Taobao Marketplace: an
eBay-like online shopping site with a whopping 760 million product
listings as of March 2013, the most recent data available. According to
Internet site ranking company Alexa, it's the 8th most popular site in
the world and the No. 3 site in China.
The
more upscale Tmall sells brand-name goods from from 70,000 global
companies including Apple, Nike, Gap and Adidas. ETao is a search engine
exclusively for shopping, which lets users hunt for products, coupons,
hotels and more. Alibaba also runs a Groupon competitor called
Juhuasuan.But
Alibaba was founded for businesses, and that legacy continues. The
namesake Alibaba.com is a trading site that connects small businesses
with two million suppliers. Both 1688.com and AliExpress focus on the
wholesale marketplace. The PayPal-like Alipay is the biggest third-party
online payment platform in China, and Aliyun.com sells cloud computing
and data services to other companies.
Alibaba's
CEO is the charismatic Jack Ma, who created the company in 1999 with 17
co-founders working out of an apartment in Hangzhou, China. Unlike many
of the dot-coms that went bust during that time, Alibaba became
profitable just three years later. That attracted big investors like
Yahoo, which currently owns about a quarter of Alibaba, and Japan's
Softbank, which owns about 37 percent.
Like
Sina Weibo, however, Alibaba also faces competition. The large Chinese
investment firm Tencent announced this month that it will buy a 15
percent in JD.com, the country's No. 2 e-commerce company.
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