(YHOO) Archives - Mad Hedge Fund Trader

Will the Alibaba IPO Blow Up the Market?

The biggest initial public offering in history is about to be issued by Chinese Internet commerce giant, Alibaba. The floatation, which could raise as much as $18 billion in cash, could value the total company as high as $220 billion, making it the fifth largest company in the US.

The big question now facing equity strategists around the world is whether the Alibaba issue is so big that it will destroy the market?

It certainly is a fair question. Some 44% of the IPO?s that have taken place this year are now underwater. The bloom has clearly gone off the new issue rose, especially for tech issues. If portfolio managers sell $18 billion of other stocks to buy the offering, it could literally suck the life out of an already fragile market.

Alibaba should have done their deal in January, when these deals were still hot. Did they miss the window?? It seems so.

The Chinese Internet juggernaut has another problem, what I call the ?Apple disease.? At $220 billion the company is so big that there is not enough money in the world to get the share price up substantially from the opening print.

Like Apple, it may become one of those behemoths that is permanently cheap, endlessly trolling the bottom of traditional valuation ranges. That frustrates the hell out of value investors. Multiple expansions never happen.

More than eye opening was the 2,300 page registration statement the company filed this week with the SEC. It included financial data for the last nine months of 2013. We learned that revenues were $5.66 billion, net profits were $2.85 billion, and the company is husbanding $7.88 billion in cash. Fair value should come to $40-$50 a share. Not bad for a communist country!

Most amazing are the 48% operating margins that the company is claiming. If true, they make competitors Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY) appear wildly overvalued.

The firm?s customer base grew by 44% YOY to 231 million last year. Chinese Internet usage generally is expected to soar from 618 million to 790 million by the end of 2016, up another 28%.

Yahoo (YHOO) paid a mere $1 billion for 40% of Alibaba in 2005, probably the only good decision they made in 15 years. After successive dilutions, the stake has fallen to 22.6%.

Yahoo really blew it when they passed on Microsoft?s (MSFT) offer to purchase the company for $31 a share just before the Great Crash, when it then plummeted to $8 a share. It was one of the worst calls I?ve ever seen, and a classic example of great technology innovators becoming lousy managers, and fall victim to hubris.

The sad thing is if you strip out the value of Yahoo?s Alibaba and Japan holdings, it is worth zero. That is probably a fair valuation given the depth to which the quality of the product has fallen. Mobile? What?s that?

The deal will make instant billionaires out of several individuals, most notably founder, Jack Ma, who is facing a $20 billion payday. Don?t you just love China!

Alibaba Ownership

34% Softbank
23% Yahoo
31% Others
8.8% Jack Ma-founder
3.6% Joseph Tsai-CEO

As for me, I?ll be passing on the IPO. It seems like the only time I get allocated shares in a new deal are when they fail. British Petroleum (BP) in 1987, ouch!

You can be sure Alibaba will be one of the most overhyped events in history, complete with dancing characters on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (dancing pandas? Dancing soy sauce bottles?). After all, that is all it is good for, now that all the trading has gone online and is controlled by high frequency traders.

I am sure that there will be a later opportunity to buy much lower, such as we saw with the Tesla (TSLA) public offering in 2010, which dropped by half to $16 before the ink was barely dry. Then it was the ?BUY? of the century.

Make Jack Ma an Offer

Doubling Up on Softbank

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I have always been a big fan of buying a dollar for 30 cents. That appears to be the opportunity now presented by the Japanese software giant, Softbank (SFTBY).

This gorilla of the Internet space was founded and run by my old friend, Masayoshi Son, who many refer to as a combination of the Jeff Bezos and the Bill Gates of Japan. I have known Mas, as his friends call him, for 30 years, meeting him, of all places, at a University of California Alumni Association meeting. Mas received his BA in economics from Berkeley in 1980.

In three decades, Mas has turned an obscure, hard copy Japanese computer hobbyist magazine into today?s massive online empire. You may know him as the organizer of the huge Comdex conferences in Las Vegas every January, the Woodstock of technology gatherings. Today, Mas has an estimated personal net worth $9 billion, not bad for a kid who wore the same pair of ragged Levis to his economics classes every day.

The really interesting thing about Softbank right now is not what Mas is doing, but what he owns. That includes a 37% stake in the Chinese Internet giant, Alibaba, which boasts an overwhelming 80% market share in the Middle Kingdom.

The Hangzhou based Alibaba is actually a group of Internet-based e-commerce businesses including business-to-business online web portals, online retail and payment services, a shopping search engine and data-centric cloud computing services. Think of it as Amazon (AMZN), eBay (EBAY), Google (GOOG), and Oracle (ORCL) all wrapped into one.

In 2012, two of Alibaba?s portals together handled 1.1 trillion Yuan ($170 billion) in sales, more than competitors eBay and Amazon.com combined.
Its sales account for no less than 3% of China?s total GDP. Yikes! To learn more about their website please: http://news.alibaba.com/specials/aboutalibaba/aligroup/index.html.

Online commerce in China is now growing faster than in any other place on the planet, including the US. Some 5% of retail transactions in the People?s Republic take place on the Internet, and that is expected to grow to 25% over the next three years. By comparison, it took online business in America 15 years to reach that market share.

What is happening in China now is truly fascinating. They are leapfrogging traditional brick and mortar stores, going straight from barter to online purchases, completely skipping the Wal-Mart stage of the retail evolution. I saw the same thing happen during the early nineties, when eastern Europeans jumped straight from having no phones to mobile ones, bypassing decades of unreliable and indifferent landline service.

The value of Alibaba is anyone?s guess as the company is still private. However, my former employers at The Economist magazine estimate that it is worth anywhere from $55-$120 billion. What this means is that you can buy Softbank now purely for the value of its Alibaba ownership, and get everything else the company does in the online universe for free.

But wait! It gets better. Softbank also owns major stakes in Yahoo, whose shares are up a gob smacking 157% since last year (Thank you Marissa Meyer!). It owns a major chunk of Sprint (S), which has gained a mind blowing 325% since 2012. Can Mas pick them, or what? Softbank also owns pieces of Japan Cellular and many other companies.

Add it all up together, and you get a Softbank that is worth at least $250 billion, almost triple its current $97 billion market capitalization. In other words, it?s a steal at this price.

Yes, you may say, this all sounds great. But how do I buy shares in Japan in yen? Easy. Softbank trades on the pink sheets in the US (hence the five letter ticker symbol) and is denominated in US dollars. Normally this means nothing, as liquidity in the pink sheets is notoriously poor.

Not so for (SFTBY), which saw 1.6 million shares worth $67 million trade around $42 a share on a slow Friday with a reasonably narrow spread. You may not be able to margin these, but at least you can get them. You also have some yen exposure here, as these shares are tied to the domestic shares in Japan. As for the big hedge funds, they have to go to Tokyo to get the size they want, and then hedge out their yen risk.

OK, OK, you say. Great story. But the road to perdition is paved with fabulous value plays that were never realized in the marketplace. This thing could stay cheap forever, like Apple (AAPL).

Aha! I got you! Alibaba is about to go public in the US, with Goldman Sachs now polling major institutional investors about potential interest. Given the chance to buy an Amazon clone at ten year ago prices, this IPO will be a blockbuster, making the recent Twitter (TWTR) float pale by comparison.

Did I mention that my buddy, Dan Loeb of hedge fund giant Third Point Partners, totally agrees with me, and has bought $1 billion worth of Softbank shares already? In fact, many believe that Alibaba could be the Apple of this decade, about to deliver a tenfold increase in its share price.

That seems to be the right thing to do this year.

Hitch Your Wagon to Mas

Time to Soak Up Some Softbank

Newsletter

I have always been a big fan of buying a dollar for 30 cents. That appears to be the opportunity now presented by the Japanese software giant, Softbank (SFTBY).

This gorilla of the Internet space was founded and run by my old friend, Masayoshi Son, who many refer to as a combination of the Jeff Bezos and the Bill Gates of Japan. I have known Mas, as his friends call him, for 30 years, meeting him, of all places, at a University of California Alumni Association meeting. Mas received his BA in economics from Berkeley in 1980.

In three decades, Mas has turned an obscure, hard copy Japanese computer hobbyist magazine into today?s massive online empire. You may know him as the organizer of the huge Comdex conferences in Las Vegas every January, the Woodstock of technology gatherings. Today, Mas has an estimated personal net worth $9 billion, not bad for a kid who wore the same pair of ragged Levis to his economics classes every day.

The really interesting thing about Softbank right now is not what Mas doing, but what he owns. That includes a 37% stake in the Chinese Internet giant, Alibaba, which boasts an overwhelming 80% market share in the Middle Kingdom.

The Hangzhou based Alibaba is actually a group of Internet-based e-commerce businesses including business-to-business online web portals, online retail and payment services, a shopping search engine and data-centric cloud computing services. Think of it as Amazon (AMZN), eBay (EBAY), Google (GOOG), and Oracle (ORCL) all wrapped into one.

In 2012, two of Alibaba?s portals together handled 1.1 trillion Yuan ($170 billion) in sales, more than competitors eBay and Amazon.com combined.
Its sales account for no less than 3% of China?s total GDP. Yikes! To learn more about their website please visit http://news.alibaba.com/specials/aboutalibaba/aligroup/index.html.