Asa Mathat
Alibaba today shed more light on its structure and business operations in its latest filing ahead of what is expected to be one of the largest IPOs in history.
The company, which is expected to raise up to $20 billion in a public offering in the coming months, revealed the full list of nine board directors, up from the four previously named. The five additional board members include Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who previously served on the board from 2005 to 2012, and Alibaba’s CEO Jonathan Lu and COO Daniel Zhang. They join company leaders Jack Ma and Joe Tsai as well as SoftBank CEO Masa Son and Jackie Reses of Yahoo on the board.
Among the revelations, the Chinese Internet company laid out how a group of 27 executives, dubbed the Alibaba Partnership, will essentially control the board of directors at the company and have the power to nominate new members.
“The interests of the Alibaba Partnership may not coincide with your interests, and the Alibaba Partnership or its director nominees may make decisions with which you disagree,” the filing, directed at potential future shareholders, reads. “In particular, given that the Alibaba Partnership will be largely comprised of members of our management team, the Alibaba Partnership may have a perspective that differs from non-management shareholders on a number of important topics, including compensation, management succession, acquisition strategy and the long-term business and financial strategy that we should follow.”
Alibaba also updated its financial information, noting that net income rose 171 percent to nearly $3.8 billion in fiscal year 2014 on a revenue increase of 52 percent to $8.4 billion.
The company gave more color regarding how its business is adapting to increasing Internet usage on mobile phones. The share of purchases made on Alibaba properties that happened via mobile devices rose from 7.4 percent in fiscal 2013 to 19 percent in fiscal 2014, the company noted. At the same time, mobile revenue grew 691 percent year over year in the last quarter, Alibaba said.
The Chinese company still hasn’t revealed which exchange it will trade on nor its target price per share.
