“We had a great meeting”, Trump told reporters, adding that Ma is “a great, great entrepreneur, one of the best in the world”.
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The maximum cash required for the proposal is expected to be HK$19.8bil (RM11.42bil), the statement said. Intime’s stock surged 35 per cent upon resuming trade Tuesday.
Almost 80% of its business comes from mobile sales as of September, Alibaba said in the statement.
Alibaba and Intime have been building their relationship for years.
It had been removed from the blacklist four years ago – but USA authorities have ruled that its Taobao platform is being used to sell a high level of fake branded products.
The company in the past few years has aggressively courted foreign brands to set up stores on Tmall to sell to the large and growing middle class in China through offering to smooth out sales, payments as well as shipping processes in China. Privatisation will allow Intime to work more closely on integrating online and offline shopping with a separate group of shareholders.
Ma, Asia’s richest man, had lauded Donal Trump as a “smart man – who will never neglect the relationship between China and America”, in an interview previous year. The shares closed Monday at $94.72, up 0.88%. “Alibaba is trying to blur the lines in its own business as consumers increasingly see their shopping as a continuous experience between brick-and-mortar locations and their mobile device”.
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That slowdown is filtering through to transaction volumes on Alibaba’s online shopping platforms where sales growth has decelerated in recent quarters, prompting the e-commerce firm to expand into other areas such as online video and local services. It announced 35 deals over the past 12 months with a total value of $US15.2 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Alibaba’s billionaire founder Jack Ma is aiming to upend a splintered and bloated Chinese retail landscape, stripping out layers of middlemen to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Alibaba is also now being investogated by the SEC for controversial accounting practices. This price is said to be 42.25% over the share price of the department store company before its trading was suspended in late December past year. The company has expanded its New York City US headquarters and it has been making a push for global participation in its signature Singles’ Day sale.
