Silver Lake and DST Global Invest in China’s Alibaba Group

Investors Silver Lake Partners and DST Global have agreed to jointly invest USD 1.6 bln in Chinese e-commerce company, Alibaba Group. The funds will primarily be used to buy back stock from employees in order to provide liquidity to them; for the liquidation program, Chinese private equity firm Yunfeng Capital will also be a lead participant, along with Singapore-based Temasek Holdings, which is already an existing stakeholder in the Alibaba Group.

Alibaba Group (www.alibaba.com)
The Alibaba Group owns Asia’s leading ecommerce portal for SMEs – Alibaba.com. The company also runs Taobao.com, China’s premier C2C ecommerce site, TMall.com, a B2C portal and China Yahoo!, and also invests in cloud computing, payment platform and search engine technologies. Founded by entrepreneur Jack Ma in 1999, the Alibaba Group is currently valued at USD 32 bln and commands an impressive customer base in excess of 500 million registered users in over 240 countries. Alibaba’s employee count tops 23,000 and spans Asia, Europe and the United States.

Silver Lake Partners (www.silverlake.com)
Silver Lake Partners, founded in 1999 and headed by Managing Director Charles Giancarlo, currently manages an investment portfolio valued at USD 14 bln. The organization’s team of private investors’ prime focus is large-scale investments in leading technology companies, some of which are Skype, Talend and, more recently, Groupon and PrimeSense. The company has so far invested from between USD 34 mln and USD 950 mln in each of their portfolio companies.