People familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that a signing ceremony “will be announced soon”. According to reports, discussions are in the advanced stage, but no details have been provided on the size of the stake, or the financial information regarding the stock.
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Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
Asked whether he was interested in buying the 112-year-old newspaper earlier this month, Ma said he was “watching a lot of companies”, but did not go into specifics.
Bloomberg said that Ma would be following the footsteps of Internet tycoons who bought media companies at a time when print media is struggling to compete with web-based competitors for advertising. Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013 while Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook Inc., bought a majority stake in the New Republic magazine in 2012.
For Ma Hong Kong is a key stepping stone as he steers his ecommerce platform into wider markets and overseas.
While Alibaba has a market capitalization of $204 billion, the SCMP Group is only a $129 million-revenue company. Hong Kong securities regulation states 25% is the minimum proportion required for a company to trade its shares. And it may not have finished yet, if widely reported rumors that it is seeking to buy the South China Morning Post newspaper turn out to be correct.
It has not yet been decided whether the buyer would be Mr. Ma or Alibaba, the person said on yesterday.
Any deal for the city’s premier English-language broadsheet may raise eyebrows in Hong Kong, where many remain proud of the city’s political separation from China’s mainland. The investments follow an alliance made between Alibaba and Shanghai Media Group last November to work together on financial services and business news. The reporter wrote about Mr. Ma supporting the violent crackdown in Beijing in 1989 around Tiananmen Square on pro-democracy protesters.
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Wang Xiangwei, who recently stepped down as the South China Morning Post’s editor in chief, stood by the article at the time of the dispute with Alibaba. A front-page headline in September, the day after China held a huge military parade to mark the end of World War II, said “Awe and Peace”. Alibaba also invested $194 million in June to acquire stake in China Business News.
