Bloomberg just published a latest update on Alibaba’s IPO, reporting that Alibaba is seeking to raise up nearly to US$1.5 billion in an IPO. This is due to the increased of Alibaba’s per share price at HK$12 to HK$13.50 in Hong Kong, up nearly 20% of the previous IPO price, i.e. HK$10 to HK$12 per share. The strong demand from institutional investors has largely affected the total amount of this IPO.

Alibaba.com is selling a combined 858.9 million shares, or 17% of its stake.

Alibaba, dubbed itself as the “world largest marketplace for global trade” has won the approval to trade on Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the IPO (Initial Public Offering) estimated to approx. $1 billion, according to the report of Reuters. It is very important for an entrepreneurial firm such as Alibaba to go public and raise more capital from the stock market.

Alibaba Group, partly owned by Yahoo! plans its B2B (business-to-business) operation, Alibaba.com as their major part of the IPO. Its B2B business helped Alibaba named as “Best of the Web: B2B” by Forbes magazine for seven consecutive years. Moreover, Alibaba had more than 24 million registered members from more than 200 countries. Its premium memberships include China and domestic Suppliers, Gold Supplier Membership and TrustPass Membership, all required to pay a certain amount of annual fee, i.e. from few hundred to few thousand to Alibaba and these membership fees accountable for Alibaba’s revenue, besides the charge of value-added services, advertisement and listing fees.

Alibaba will launch its share offering in this month, with the listing expected in later October or early November. Underwriters selected to manage the offering included Deutsche Bank AG, Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley.

If you know what PayPal mean to eBay, then you’ll know the importance of Alipay to Taobao, a site owned by Alibaba. Alipay just announced that it will not permit the Firefox users to access its secure Web page and process the payment after this August 15. The main reason is that information layout on the Alipay site can’t be authenticated via Firefox browser, and the Opera browser as well. It is therefore, the Firefox users need to download an add-on, i.e. IE tab in order to continue using the Alipay system, as shown on this page (in Mandarin). I’m just wonder, for a site to succeed in the market, should Alibaba set up some restrictions on the site that tend to turn away the users who loved the Firefox or Opera. Some Chinese users believed this move will also bring the negative impact on the Linux users that Firefox browser is pre-installed in the Linux operating system.

Meanwhile, Alipay management seem very confident that their request for the IE browser in order to use its system will only bring about a dramatic increase in trading volume. With the strategic partnership between Yahoo! and Alibaba, and we know Yahoo! has released its own customized version of Internet Explorer (IE), it’s not surprise that Alibaba is now backing the use of IE on Alipay.

Founded in 1995, since then eBay has grew into the world’s largest and most popular person-to-person auction community on the web. And despite the fact of the huge success of eBay in U.S., Europe and some other countries, it having the difficulty in entering China’s Internet market and eBay China was thinking that the best solution for them is through the joint-venture approach. I previously have posted that eBay will close its unprofitable China Web auction unit and form a venture with billionaire Li Ka-shing’s Tom Online to run the business in the world’s second-biggest Internet market. There are, of course, downsides to this approach. It mean eBay China would only hold a certain stake of the new venture. The aforesaid news was announced in December last year and according to the latest news (in Mandarin) pertaining to this, the new venture, i.e. Tom-eBay China is under development and will launch to the market in this July. This new venture will focusing on the Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) businesses while eBay China’s existing businesses would target in international business and remain controlled by eBay management. Moreover, eBay China will become a subsidiary of the above mentioned Tom-eBay China.

Nonetheless, Tom has enjoyed a good relationship with eBay and it makes sense because eBay’s Skype partner in China was Tom.com. As I visited the Tom.com & Skype, they have developed the latest Chinese version of Skype that targeting the Chinese users, i.e. version 3.1. For Tom-eBay China, I suspect the domain that they’ll be using is tom-ebay.com.cn.

In fact, the person-to-person auction arena is not entirely a new market. The competition in China’s auction market is fierce and there are several direct competitors for the Tom-eBay China when it officially launched in July, these include Taobao, owned by Alibaba and paipai, owned by Tencent.

There is a succinct list of reasons why competitors sometimes can work together and this is a real example that just happened in China. Taobao, an online auction firm owned by Alibaba has joint force with eBay China in preventing the Internet fraud. Their objectives are to curb the illegal trade of Internet accounts over both auction websites particularly. The agreement for the above mentioned cooperation is mutual, reported by Reuters.

Perhaps this can be considered as a trade-off. A trade-off in between the need for technical support in preventing the illegal Internet trading and the desire of local access to the accounts. This is a short-term cooperation as the goals have been achieved by both parties, I wonder the relationships between Taobao and eBay China will go back to the old days. And most recently, the competition of online auction in China is still very intense, the issue of cooperation is a noncore activity and thus, would not have any significant implications to their long-term relationships in Internet’s auction market.

Sina.com of China just ran an interesting news, entitled, “2006 IT Awards in China” (in Mandarin). This is an annual ceremony to honor and pays tribute to the top 10 IT firms and most important people in China. This award was jointly organized by these three parties, i.e. Yesky, Sina, and Nanfang Daily.

I’m not going to talk about any of the top 10 most important people. The main reason is this, I feel it’s a bit of trivial to talk about the successful people here, as you probably would understand I will only focus my writing on startups and companies. Please pardon my viewpoint.

The top 10 IT firms in China is as follows:

Alibaba, Google China, Gome, Lenovo, Hasee, Shanda, Tencent, Tom.com, Xunlei, and Intel China.

I believed most of the readers have heard of Alibaba, Google, Lenovo, and Intel. For Alibaba, I also wrote some of the latest news of Alibaba, you can check with the sidebar of this blog to know more about it. For other companies, I will briefly explain here and you also can click the links as I provided in the above. Gome is a portal that mainly sell electronic products. And Hasee, it is a successful portal that sell PCs, laptops, and computer related items in China. Shanda, i.e. Shanda Interactive Entertainment Limited, went public and listed in Nasdaq, is a leading interactive entertainment media company in China and offers a portfolio of diversified entertainment content that is accessible via the Internet. Whereas Tencent is a successful company that released the well-known QQ messenger. I also wrote a post that entitled, “TM 2007 Beta 1 First Impression” recently. Another company, Tom.com, it is a company that partner with eBay China and they are going to jointly-launch a new portal and I will write on that soon. And lastly, Xunlei, as you probably heard of Google has bought a stake in Xunlei, to know more about this company, you can read my another post, entitled, “Google China Invested in Xunlei“.

My sense is that from now on, it is interesting to know which firm will going to succeed in China this year. 2008 will tell.

The Shanghai Daily just ran a story entitled, “Alibaba expands into software“. From the article, Alibaba has set up another subsidiary named Alisoft that managed the software businesses for Alibaba. It is not the first time Alibaba has venture into software industry, prior to this, Alibaba has launched CRM (Customer Relationship Management) System version 1.2 in November this year. The establishment of Alisoft thus would help Alibaba further consolidated the software businesses under the umbrella of it.

On the Alisoft web page, one can observe the listed 4 steps of doing e-commerce in Alibaba, i.e. explore the business opportunity positively, establish the business connection effectively, tracking the business flow, and evaluate the performance of an organization scientifically (in Mandarin, I translated into English here). At the bottom of the page, one can download the software tool developed by Alibaba, i.e. AliTalk by clicking the blue button.

Alibaba is set to be China’s answer to eBay, and it seems that Alibaba is on the way building it right now.

I just came across a new web platform developed by Alibaba China on the web. This platform has not been given an English name by Alibaba at this moment, as you can only see the Chinese name listed in the image above. The main objective of this platform is to served as a value-added service for all the Alibaba users to ask question whenever they face the business problems, and then they would received answers from the web community.

I wonder this idea was derived from the success of Yahoo! Answers. In short, I like the web 2.0 concept and I also believe this new platform is a valuable solution that can compliment Alibaba’s portfolio of businesses.