Yahoo, Alibaba | featured news

China's Alibaba Group said it bought back half the stake Yahoo Inc owned in the company for about $7.6 billion, moving closer to an initial public offering.

Yahoo Inc could be weeks away from selling 15 to 25 percent of Alibaba Group's stock back to China's largest e-commerce company, in a deal designed to eliminate complexities that had scuttled the parties' previous negotiations, a person familiar with the matter said.

Yahoo Inc and its Asian partners, China's Alibaba and Japan's Softbank Corp, have called off talks over a tax-free sale of the U.S. company's Asian assets, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters.

China's Alibaba Group has hired Washington lobbying firm Duberstein Group Inc as it eyes a possible deal with Internet giant Yahoo Inc.

Yahoo Inc is discussing a plan to slash its stakes in China's Alibaba Group and its Japanese affiliate as part of a complicated share transaction valued at roughly $17 billion, sources familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

Jack Ma, chief executive of Chinese Internet company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, told an audience at an event at Stanford University that he was "interested" in buying Yahoo Inc.

Today at the China 2.0 conference at Stanford, Alibaba Groups’s Jack Ma replied to a pointed question about buying Yahoo with, “We are very interested in Yahoo. Our Alibaba group is important to Yahoo and Yahoo is important to us … All the serious buyers interested in Yahoo have talked to us.”

Yahoo Inc said on Tuesday it has removed CEO Carol Bartz and replaced her on an interim basis with Chief Financial Officer Tim Morse, ending a rocky two-year run marked by stagnating growth and a bitter rift with Chinese partner Alibaba.

Yahoo and Chinese internet company Alibaba reach an agreement over its online payment service Alipay... Yahoo and Alibaba have now agreed that Alibaba would benefit from any future financial gain, such as a public offering.

Yahoo executives said they had made "significant progress" with Alibaba Group to settle a row over ownership of a key unit that affects the value of the U.S. Internet giant's investment in its Chinese partner.