Become millionaires as the e-commerce conglomerate heads into what is expected to be one of the largest initial public offerings in global history.
According to Alibaba's draft prospectus, employees hold 26.7 percent of existing shares, which could translate into roughly 44.8 billion USD worth of unlocked shares, according to estimates from a Bloomberg survey of analysts.
As the largest e-commerce company in the world and owner of the Taobao shopping site, Alibaba Group is valued at 168 billion USD. But employees, who built the company from scratch over some 15 years, are hardly the biggest winners of the Hangzhou-based company's upcoming IPO in the United States.
Yahoo! Inc, a US-based multinational Internet corporation, which invested 1 billion USD and holds 23 percent of Alibaba, could also score multiple billions of dollars from Alibaba's potential 20 billion USD listing.
While developed Western countries are growing slowly, China's GDP growth is still more than 7 percent a year－amid a lacklustre performance by the world economy.
Bertelsmann Asia Investments has invested in more than 30 start ups in China since 2009 and more than half of them are in the TMT sector, Long says.
Four of the companies that Bertelsmann has invested in have gone public, including the US-listed Bitauto Holdings Ltd, a leading provider of Internet content and marketing services for China's fast-growing automotive industry.
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Become millionaires as the e-commerce conglomerate heads into what is expected to be one of the largest initial public offerings in global history.
