Alibaba Group Closes $7.6 Billion Share-Repurchase and Restructuring of Yahoo! Relationship
On September 18, 2012, Alibaba Group Holding Limited, China's largest e-commerce company, announced that it has completed the initial repurchase of shares from Yahoo! and restructured its relationship with Yahoo! in transactions valued at US$7.6 billion. Alibaba Group financed the transaction with a mixture of cash on hand, senior debt, and the issuance of convertible preference and ordinary shares. The lead investors in the share offering included Boyu Capital, CIC International, and CITIC Capital. Their investment is believed to be one of the largest private equity investments in a Chinese company and in the global technology sector. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati advised Boyu Capital in connection with the transaction.
The Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati team that represented Boyu Capital in this matter included Weiheng Chen, Zhan Chen, Wei Xiao, Jing Xu, and Alex Cao in the firm's Hong Kong office, with assistance from Jonathan Zhu and Myra Sutanto Shen in the firm's tax practice and Madeleine Boshart, Scott McCall, and Cisco Palao-Ricketts in the employee benefits and compensation practice.
For more information, please see Alibaba Group's press release.
