Alibaba.com, China's largest online business-to-business (B2B) marketplace for global and domestic trade, plans what could be a US$1 billion share sale in Hong Kong to help fuel growth, sources said.

 

The company, a subsidiary of the Alibaba Group and 40 percent owned by Yahoo, picked Hong Kong over the New York and London stock markets for what would be the biggest initial public offering for a mainland Internet company.

 

Investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are arranging the impending public offering.

 

Jack Ma, Alibaba's founder, is said to have pondered over different candidate bourses, including NASDAQ, but chose Hong Kong because of tighter listing rules in the US, which hold accounting practices and corporate executives to higher scrutiny.

 

The US legislation, which was introduced five years ago in the wake of the Enron and Worldcom scandals, is often the subject of complaints from existing and potential issuers. It encourages companies to turn to London or Hong Kong, where regulators are more flexible.

 

NASDAQ has been Chinese technology companies' preferred listing destination for its higher valuations, which generate more profit.

 

Baidu.com, the most popular Internet search engine on the Chinese mainland, listed on the NASDAQ in August 2005. Its shares have risen five times above the offering price.

 

Alibaba's Hong Kong listing will involve only the group's business-to-business unit, which includes a Chinese site that aims to match traders within the domestic market and an English site for traders around the world.

 

Alibaba reaped a revenue of US$200 million last year, twice that of Baidu's.

 

HiSoft Technology International Ltd, China's leading software exporter, plans to float on NASDAQ as early as the end of the year, becoming the first company in its sector to sell shares on the US exchange.

 

"We are preparing for the share offering and expect to complete the listing in the fourth quarter or before next March," HiSoft officials told China Daily earlier. They declined to reveal how much the company is going to raise through the IPO.

 

The company is based in Hangzhou in East China and has 16 sales and service centers across China, as well as offices in Hong Kong, the US and Europe. The company had more than 3,500 full-time employees at the end of 2006.

 

(China Daily June 21, 2007)