America's Road To Fame Chapter 360

This time I came to the magic capital, on the one hand, to carry out adaptive training here, on the other hand, it was the magic capital where Ivanta had brought their daughter Anna. I came to China to accompany Ivanta and her daughter.

But not long after he arrived in the magic capital, Boss Ma came here to look for him.

At present, Alibaba Cloud is already providing internal services, and the performance is satisfactory, so it is ready to be officially launched soon, open to the public, and provide cloud services.

Alibaba Cloud cooperated with Meta Cloud in the process of research and development, and Chen William also invested in it, occupying 20% of Alibaba Cloud's shares, but this part of the shareholding is not through Meta Group, but Chen William in the company. holdings by Future Group in the Asian region.

After all, although Meta Cloud is mainly aimed at the overseas market of China, it is also a product in the same field as Alibaba Cloud. Therefore, it is not suitable for Meta Group to hold shares in Alibaba Cloud, and Boss Ma is not willing to let the future possible competitors.

Now, Meta Group is already an asset of the Caitlin Foundation on the surface, and it is not directly held by William Chen. Therefore, it is reasonable to use the Future Group to hold shares in Alibaba Cloud.

And to be honest, Boss Ma developed Alibaba Cloud at this time mainly to solve the server problem of Taobao. Although the "Double 11" event was very successful, before that time, the pressure that Alibaba's servers needed to face was still for Ma. The boss is determined to develop Alibaba Cloud so that they can flexibly provide server resources for e-commerce.

Chen William naturally knew that investing in Alibaba Cloud would be a good deal. After all, he only invested 300 million US dollars in it, and together with the joint research and development in technology, he got 20% of the shares of Alibaba Cloud. The company's valuation would be closer to $100 billion.

But Boss Ma doesn't know this. To be honest, he is very grateful for William Chen's investment in helping Alibaba Cloud's R&D. Because when Alibaba Cloud was developed at that time, starting from 2008, there were no results for nearly three years, but it required continuous investment from Alibaba.

This made other departments of Ali company have a lot of opinions. At one point, he even directly questioned Boss Ma whether the so-called cloud computing was impossible to succeed.

At the end of last year, under various pressures, there were even rumors that Alibaba Cloud would be abolished. At the annual meeting, Dr. Wang Jian was excited and gave a tearful speech.

In fact, this is not even a speech. After he took the stage, he burst into tears, but choked up and said, "I have been scolded even more in the past two years than in my whole life. However, I don't regret it. It's just that I saw it before I took the stage. Several colleagues, they used to be in Alibaba Cloud, but now they are not in Alibaba Cloud..."

After that, Boss Ma publicly stood up and said: "I invest 1 billion yuan in Alibaba Cloud every year, and I invest for ten years. I can't do it."

How much pressure did the Alibaba Cloud department face at that time? In William Chen's previous life, Dr. Wang Jian recalled Alibaba Cloud's entrepreneurial history when he was invited to participate in the program later, and said calmly, "Alibaba Cloud was bought with life."

It was at this time that William Chen proposed to Boss Ma to cooperate with Alibaba to develop Alibaba Cloud, and to invest 300 million US dollars in Alibaba Cloud in exchange for 20% of the shares.

At this time, Alibaba Cloud has invested less than 300 million US dollars in the past three years, which shows that William Chen's valuation of Alibaba Cloud is more than 1.5 billion US dollars.

This also strengthened Ma's confidence in developing Alibaba Cloud, and agreed to Chen William's investment.

Now, Alibaba Cloud has finally succeeded. After the completion of the internal business of Alibaba, it will be released to the public soon.

But this time Boss Ma came to look for Chen William, and the main thing was not about Alibaba Cloud.

After listening to Boss Ma's words, Chen William realized that he already had the idea of delisting from HK.

At the end of 2007, Alibaba took its B2B business as the main body and successfully listed on the main board of HK. At that time, it raised 11.6 billion Hong Kong dollars. At the time of listing, the stock price exceeded 40 Hong Kong dollars.

However, since 2009, Alibaba's B2B stock performance has begun to decline, and until recently, it has fallen to about 10 Hong Kong dollars, less than a quarter of its highest value.

This is why William Chen was able to buy 40% of Alibaba's shares from Yahoo for $4 billion. Otherwise, at its peak in the pre-IPO period in HK, the total market value of its B2B business exceeded US$20 billion, and Yahoo would not have agreed to sell Alibaba's stock at that price. That is, the subprime mortgage crisis and the slump in Alibaba's stock price would make Chen Chen William succeeded.

Now, Ali's business is ready to transform, focusing on Taobao and the just-launched Tmall mall, plus other businesses including Alipay and Alibaba Cloud, its B2B business is no longer the most important business, and the current downturn The stock price can even weigh on the overall valuation.

After all, Boss Ma also intends to package and list the entire Ali Group, but the premise is to carry out AB shares. .

However, the HK exchange does not support AB shares. There is a high probability that if Alibaba Group is listed, it will still choose the United States. Therefore, privatizing Alibaba's B2B business in advance and delisting from HK can also pave the way for the overall listing in the future.

Therefore, Boss Ma believes that it is necessary to communicate with Chen William, the major shareholder of Ali, in advance on this matter.

In this regard, Chen William has no opinion at all. He knows that Ali's HK listing is actually a profit for Ali itself.

Therefore, according to Boss Ma's plan, privatization and delisting were carried out at a stock price of 13.5 Hong Kong dollars, which was a premium of nearly 35% compared to the current stock price.

But you must know that when Alibaba's B2B business was listed in HK in 2007, the issue price of the stock was HK$13.5. It seems that, after a turn around, Alibaba is now taking back the circulating stock on the HK exchange at the price of HK$13.5. It is equivalent to the 1.7 billion US dollars raised by its listing in HK, which was used for a few years in vain, and then returned without paying interest.

After talking about this matter, what Boss Ma said next became interesting. He told William Chen that some companies in Huaguo were also interested in investing in Ali. % of Alibaba's shares.

Uh, it's a bit interesting. In a previous life, Boss Ma had a similar operation before Ali went public in the United States, but he bought half of Yahoo's shares, or 20% of the shares, at a price of $7 billion.

This time, it may be because Chen William is different from Yahoo in his previous life. At that time, Yahoo was very dissatisfied with Ali because of the split of Alipay. The two sides were once in great conflict, so Boss Ma would find a way to buy back their shares and let him feel good about the company. Control is firmer.

Now William Chen and Boss Ma have been working well together. But Boss Ma still seems to be a cautious character. Even so, he is not worried that William Chen holds up to 40% of the shares of Ali.

After all, in his opinion, in the field of e-commerce, William Chen holds shares in Zoom in the United States and Jingdong in Huaguo; in the field of payment, he also has PayPal; and in the recent cloud computing field, he has Meta Cloud.

It can be said that in many fields of Ali company, there are competitors, or the shares of potential competitors in the future, or it is simply his company...

Therefore, although Boss Ma did not want to kick the opponent out of Ali like he did to Yahoo in his previous life, he still wanted to take back part of Chen William's shares first to put himself in a safer position.

And his bid this time, compared to the previous life's $7 billion purchase of 20% of Yahoo's Alibaba shares, using $5 billion to buy 10% of William Chen's shares, it can be said that the price is higher.

When William Chen bought all 40% of Ali's shares, it only cost 4 billion US dollars. Now Boss Ma's bid is equivalent to a valuation of 20 billion US dollars for the total value of shares held by Chen William. He bought it directly. Five times the price.

At this price, if it was someone else, I'm afraid I would agree to it in one bite.

However, William Chen knows that in the future, the market value of Ali after its listing will reach a maximum of 850 billion US dollars. Even if Chen William's shareholding ratio was reduced to about 35% due to the listing at that time, it would be nearly 300 billion US dollars. Wealth, so it is definitely impossible for him to give up this part of his shares at a mere $20 billion total valuation.

Chapter end

Report