Beijing: Alibaba Group Holding revealed the members of its powerful 27-person partnership and expanded board on Monday, while disclosing that its growth has slowed from the red-hot pace of recent quarters.
In an updated prospectus for what could be the largest tech IPO in history, e-commerce firm Alibaba said the partnership includes founder Jack Ma, Executive Vice Chairman Joseph Tsai and Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Lu. The partnership has the exclusive right to nominate a majority of Alibaba`s future nine-member board.
Among the four independent directors asked to join a post-IPO board are former Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa, Yahoo Inc founder Jerry Yang, and J. Michael Evans, former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Alibaba is widely expected to eclipse Facebook Inc`s USD15 billion initial share sale in 2012 when it debuts late this summer on a U.S. exchange.
The Alibaba Partnership is comprised of 22 members of management, four members of the company`s Small and Micro Financial Services Co and one management member of China Smart Logistics, for a total of 27 people. The company previously said the group encompassed 28 members; it did not explain the change on Monday.
Alibaba has said partners are elected annually and the partnership has the exclusive right to nominate for shareholder approval a majority of its board directors.
The company`s five executive board directors are Ma, Tsai, Lu, Chief Operating Officer Daniel Zhang, and Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank Corp, Alibaba`s biggest shareholder with a 34.3 percent stake.
REVENUE GROWTH SLOWS
Monday`s updated filing also gave investors more information about the operations of Alibaba, which handles more transactions than Amazon.com Inc and eBay Inc combined. Its initial prospectus, filed in May, was criticised for a lack of detail.
Alibaba reported its net income in the quarter ended March 31 climbed 32 percent to 5.543 billion yuan. Revenue was up 38 percent to 12.031 billion yuan. The pace of revenue growth was down from 62 percent in the previous quarter.
Shares of Yahoo, which tend to move in sync with the perceived valuation of its roughly 24 percent slice of Alibaba, were down 5 percent near midday.
The filing also broke out the value of goods transacted over Alibaba marketplaces Taobao and Tmall, two of its largest businesses, without revealing profitability.
Taobao, which like eBay enables individuals and small businesses to sell goods, had gross merchandise volume of 295 billion yuan (USD47.5 billion) in the three months ended March, up 32 percent from the previous year.
For Tmall, where bigger brands sell to consumers similar to Amazon, gross merchandise volume was up 90 percent year-on-year to 135 billion yuan in the quarter ended March.
Mobile transactions accounted for 27.4 percent of gross merchandise volume, up sharply from 19.7 percent in the previous quarter.
