Top Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba.com full-year 2007 profit grew 340 percent, boosted by a buoyant Chinese economy, increasing Internet access in the country and healthy growth in the firm’s number of paying members. And the genius of Jack Ma.

Alibaba.com, an online business-to-business site connecting companies looking to import and export Chinese goods, was founded in 1999 as a bulletin board for businesses to post trade leads.

Last year, Alibaba had a 57.3% share of China’s RMB3.9 billion business-to-business market.

Alibaba, in which U.S. Internet company Yahoo is a key investor, reported a profit of RMB967.8 million ($136.7 million) for the year to the end of 2007, compared with RMB219.93 million a year earlier.

Our illustration shows Alibaba.com founder Jack Ma giving the thumbs-up at the Hong Kong stock exchange on a previous occasion. He is damn well entitled to. The fact that the share prices go up and down is due to the vagaries of the stock market, not the soundness of the business.
Source: Reuters

The strong rumor is that Alibaba.com has won approval from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for a long-anticipated IPO expected to be worth roughly $1 billion.

Alibaba Group, which is partly owned by Yahoo, plans to list its business-to-business operation, Alibaba.com, but does not plan to make its other units part of the initial public offering, one source said.

Jack Ma, seen here, founded Alibaba in his Hangzhou apartment in 1999 with 18 employees as an online business-to-business marketplace.

Now, Alibaba.com provides a platform for small and medium-sized buyers and suppliers from China and overseas for international and domestic online trading and employs 4,400 full-time staff.

Its marketplaces form a community of more than 24 million members globally.

Alibaba absorbed Yahoo’s China business in 2005, and Yahoo bought a 40% stake in Alibaba for $1 billion as part of that deal.
Source: Reuters