SEGANTII Capital Management’s hedge fund faced nearly US$1 billion of withdrawal requests before its decision to shut down, sources familiar with the matter said, highlighting the impact on investor confidence from this month’s insider trading charge in Hong Kong.

While the fund’s rules allowed only monthly or quarterly redemptions before withdrawals were suspended on Thursday (May 23), some of Segantii’s largest investors had already indicated plans to pull their money. Founder Simon Sadler and chief executive officer Kurt Ersoy told staff on a call on Thursday that the fund would close, one of the sources said earlier.

The executives said the hedge fund will wind down in a measured fashion, and deferred questions on compensation and jobs, the source said. Ersoy declined to comment on the specifics of redemption notices.

The closing marks an abrupt end for one of Asia’s largest hedge funds that ran almost US$5 billion in assets as at last month and had attracted global investors for its stellar returns and knack for carrying out complex block trades of stocks.

About 140 employees, mostly in Hong Kong, New York and London, will be affected by the shutdown. Segantii on Thursday separately informed a new hire, slated to start next week, that the individual was no longer needed, a source with knowledge of the matter.

Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission this month charged the firm, one of its former staffers and Sadler with insider trading tied to a block trade in 2017. “Segantii intends to defend itself vigorously against the charge,” the company said at the time.

Segantii said that the fund’s directors have determined there’s a risk that the legal action may adversely impact the company’s ability to implement its investment strategy, according to a letter to investors seen by Bloomberg. The firm said it’s suspending redemptions “with immediate effect” in order to return cash over time.

“It is in the best interests of our investors to return their capital in an orderly manner,” a spokesperson for Segantii said. “We have always believed at Segantii that it is a great responsibility and privilege to professionally manage money and we have never taken that lightly.”

In a separate investor letter for April, the firm said it could liquidate 84 per cent of its portfolio within a day and 97 per cent within five days. Segantii’s illiquid holdings have included startups Klarna, Ola, Bundl and Enable, a source with knowledge of the matter said.

It’s a remarkable turn of events for Sadler, who earned a reputation as the region’s “block-trade king” and was sought after by Wall Street banks for generating high trading volume. Block trades are off-exchange, privately negotiated transactions involving large amounts of publicly listed shares.

The firm listed nine banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas and UBS Group, as its prime brokers in a March performance update to investors. Global prime brokers with ties to Segantii have been limiting or assessing their positions with the firm, Bloomberg previously reported.

Funds managed by Goldman, and MIO Partners, a subsidiary of McKinsey & Co that invests on behalf of its pension plans, are among Segantii’s current investors, sources with knowledge of the matter said. Representatives for MIO and Goldman declined to comment.

Sadler, a former trader at Deutsche Bank, founded the firm in Hong Kong in late 2007 with US$26.5 million. The company opened offices in London, New York and Dubai, and produced strong investment returns from trading globally with a focus on Asia-Pacific stocks and equity-linked securities.

Segantii’s fund was up 2.9 per cent to April this year, according to the investor letter. Since inception, the fund returned more than 12 per cent a year, topping the 9.9 per cent gain in the S&P 500 Total Return Index, and the 5 per cent gain for a Eurekahedge Asia gauge, according to the update.

The consistent returns won over global investors, helping Sadler amass a net worth of at least US$360 million, which includes his ownership of the UK soccer team in his hometown of Blackpool. The firm had US$4.77 billion in assets at the end of April.

Meanwhile, the insider trading case against Segantii, Sadler and former trader Daniel La Rocca is moving to a higher Hong Kong court that can hand out longer sentences for convictions, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Hong Kong authorities plan to transfer the criminal proceedings to the District Court from a Magistrates’ Court that’s currently handling the case, the people said. The District Court can impose sentences of up to seven years in prison for convictions, compared with two to three years at the lower court.

Sadler and La Rocca appeared in the Eastern Magistrates’ Court on May 2 and did not enter a plea. The next hearing is in June. BLOOMBERG

Read More

share this article!

SINGAPORE’S factory output fell 1.6 per cent year on year in April, slowing from the previous month’s contraction, as output in the volatile biomedical cluster fell, data from the Singapore Economic Development Board showed on Friday (May 24).

This was worse than the forecast given by economists, who predicted a median contraction of 0.5 per cent in a Bloomberg poll.

However, April’s prints were an improvement from March’s 9.2 per cent contraction.

Excluding the volatile biomedical sector, output increased 1.7 per cent year on year in April, reversing from the 5.9 per cent slide in March.

Factory output in the key electronics sector fell 1.1 per cent on the year, slowing from the 11.3 per cent contraction in the previous month.

Output in the biomedical sector contracted 29.1 per cent year on year in April, extending from the 34.8 per cent decline in March.

In particular, the pharmaceuticals segment posted a 54.6 per cent drop in production in April, though this was partially offset by a 13.6 per cent rise in the medical technology segment’s output.

All other clusters grew:

Transport engineering (10.6 per cent)

General manufacturing (7.3 per cent)

Chemicals (3.1 per cent)

Precision engineering (2.9 per cent)

On a seasonally adjusted, monthly basis, manufacturing output grew 7.1 per cent in April, reversing from the 16.1 per cent decline in March.

Excluding biomedical manufacturing, output rose by 3.6 per cent, improving from the 8.6 per cent decline earlier.

Read More

share this article!

CHINA has a housing problem. A very big one. It has nearly 4 million apartments that no one wants to buy, a combined expanse of unwanted living space roughly the area of Philadelphia.

Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, and his deputies have called on the government to buy them.

The plan, announced last week, is the boldest move yet by Beijing to stop the tailspin of a housing crisis that threatens one of the world’s biggest economies. It was also not nearly enough.

China has a bigger problem lurking behind all those empty apartments: even more homes that developers already sold but have not finished building. By one conservative estimate, that figure is around 10 million apartments.

The scale of China’s real estate boom was breathtaking. The extent of its unrelenting bust, which began nearly four years ago, remains vast and unclear.

China’s leaders were already managing a slowdown after three decades of double-digit growth before the housing crisis created a downturn that is spiraling out of their control.

Few experts believe that Beijing can transition to more sustainable growth without confronting all those empty apartments and the developers that overextended to build them. All told, trillions of dollars are owed to builders, painters, real estate agents, small companies and banks around the country.

After decades of promoting the biggest real estate boom the world has ever seen, and allowing it to become nearly one-third of China’s economic growth, Beijing stepped in suddenly in 2020 to cut off the easy money that fueled the expansion, setting off a chain of bankruptcies that shocked a nation of homebuyers.

It was the first test of Beijing’s determination to wean China’s economy off its decades-long dependence on building and construction to sustain the economy.

Now the government is confronting another test of its resolve. To stop the excesses of the past, it signalled over the last few years that no real estate company was too big to fail. But as dozens of big developers have gone bust, they have obliterated any confidence that remained in the housing market. Officials have since tried everything to restore optimism among buyers. Nothing has worked.

With few buyers, developers that are still standing are also on the brink of default. And they are intricately connected to local banks and the financial system that underpins the government in every village, town and city.

One recent estimate, from the research firm Rhodium Group, put the real estate sector’s entire domestic borrowings, including loans and bonds, at more than US$10 trillion, of which only a tiny portion have been recognised.

“Right now, not being able to sell homes looks like a risk, but it isn’t. More developers going bankrupt is,” said Dan Wang, chief economist at Hang Seng Bank. The first big developers to default, including China Evergrande, were problems hiding in plain sight.

Evergrande’s initial default in December 2021 set off fears of China’s own “Lehman moment,” a reference to the 2008 collapse of Lehman Bros, which set off a global financial meltdown.

The fallout, however, was carefully and quietly managed through policy support that let Evergrande finish building many apartments. By the time a judge ordered the company to be liquidated five months ago, Evergrande had effectively ceased being a viable business.

But China has tens of thousands of smaller developers around the country. The only way for officials to stop the free fall in the market, Wang said, is to bail out some midsize developers in cities where the crisis is more acute.

China’s top leaders are instead refocusing the lens to address the millions of apartments that no one wants to buy, pledging to turn them into social housing at lower rents. They have committed US$41.5 billion to help fund loans for state-owned companies to start buying unwanted property — altogether equivalent to 8 billion square feet, of which a little more than 4 billion square feet is unsold apartments, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

When the Beijing’s response was announced last week, shares in developers initially rallied. But some critics said the initiative had come too late. And most speculated that it would take a lot more money. Estimates ranged from US$280 billion to US$560 billion.

Officials in Beijing began softening their approach last year. They directed banks to funnel loans and other financing to dozens of real estate companies they deemed good enough to be on a government “white list.”

The support was not enough to stop housing prices from crashing.

Policymakers pulled other levers. They made their biggest cut ever to mortgage rates. They tried pilot programmes to get residents to trade in old apartments and buy new ones. They even offered cheap loans to some cities to test out the idea of buying unsold apartments.

In all, local authorities tried out more than 300 measures to increase sales and bolster real estate companies, according to Caixin, a Chinese economic news outlet.

Still, the number of unsold homes continued to reach new levels. Prices of new homes kept falling. So at the end of April, Xi and his top 23 policymakers began to discuss the idea of taking some of those unwanted apartments off the market in a programme not unlike the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which the US government set up in the wake of the American housing market crash.

Last week, China’s most senior official in charge of the economy, Vice-Premier He Lifeng, convened an online gathering of officials from across the country and delivered the news: It was time to start buying apartments. Not long after, the central bank loosened rules for mortgages and the central bank promised to make billions of dollars available to help state-owned companies buy apartments.

The move underscored just how worried the government had become about the dysfunctions in the housing market.

Yet almost as soon as state media reported He’s call on local governments to buy unsold apartments, economists started asking questions.

Would local governments be expected to buy all the unsold apartments? What if they, in turn, could not find buyers? And there was the price tag: Economists calculated that such a programme should be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, not tens of billions.

More worryingly, to some, the central bank had already quietly started an apartment buyback program for eight hard-hit cities, committing US$14 billion in cheap loans, of which only US$280 million had been used. Those governments did not appear to be interested in using the loans for the same reason that consumers did not want to buy houses in smaller cities.

One big difference now, said John Lam, the head of China property research at UBS, the Swiss bank, is political will. The country’s most powerful leaders have said they stand behind a buyback plan. That will put political pressure on officials to act.

“The local government can acquire the apartments at a loss,” Lam said.

Yet in places where the population is shrinking, which are some of the same cities and towns where developers expanded most aggressively, there will be little need for social housing projects.

The optimistic view is that Beijing has more planned.

“Beijing is headed in the right direction with regard to ending the epic housing crisis,” Ting Lu, chief China economist at the Japanese bank Nomura, wrote in an email to clients.

The task, he added, was a daunting one that required “more patience when awaiting more draconian measures.” NYTIMES

Read More

share this article!

INDIAN power generation firm Tata Power is planning to raise as much as US$1 billion equivalent for clean energy projects, in what could be the country’s largest local currency loan this year.

The unit of Tata Group, one of India’s largest conglomerates, is in talks with lenders including State Bank of India, IndusInd Bank, Axis Bank and ICICI Bank for the loan, sources familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified as the information is private.

India’s largest local currency loan for this year was Assam Bio Refinery’s deal of US$365 million in February. If Tata Power’s planned borrowing finalises with a size anywhere near US$1 billion, it would take that title.

The proceeds of the loan will be used to fund the company’s investment of US$1.6 billion announced in August to develop some clean energy projects known as pumped hydro storage, the sources familiar said.

India aims to nearly triple its green power capacity by the end of the decade and firms including Tata Power, Adani Green Energy and Reliance Industries are ramping up such efforts. Tata Power is targeting a near fourfold growth in its renewable generation capacity by 2027.

The deal may be a bilateral loan or a clubbed facility. The company expects to finalise credit lines with lenders in the next three to six months, after which disbursements will take place in tranches depending on project development, the sources said. The loan may be priced over local gauges such as the Reserve Bank of India’s repo rate or treasury bills, they added. Negotiations are ongoing and details of the deal may change.

Tata Power and the banks mentioned didn’t respond to requests seeking comments. BLOOMBERG

Read More

share this article!

Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio has been revealed to have joined the ranks of billionaires snapping up multimillion-dollar shophouses in Singapore.

His family office, the Dalio Family Office, purchased two shophouses at 44 and 46 Club Street in 2021 for about S$25.5 million, two sources told Financial Times.

FT also referenced a development approval issued by the government in end-2023 for the shophouse site, which listed Tan Mae Shen, the Singapore managing director of the Dalio Family Office, as the developer. The properties are currently undergoing renovation, due for completion next year.

In 2021, The Straits Times reported that Arcc Holdings and its chief executive Tony Chen sold the two 999-year leasehold shophouses for a total of S$25.5 million, or S$3,935 per square foot. The buyer was reportedly a foreign-based family office.

Dalio announced the opening of a family office in Singapore in 2020 to run his investments and philanthropy in the region.

Shophouse sales in Singapore have been gaining traction as more high-net-worth investors make their return.

In February, the wife of Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Zhang Ying, was reported by The Business Timesto have bought three adjoining shophouses on Duxton Road in the Tanjong Pagar area for about S$45 million to S$50 million. She is a Singapore citizen.

Sales of shophouses rose 52.2 per cent to S$169.1 million in the first quarter of 2024 from the previous quarter on the back of more deals in larger quantums, based on a report by property consultancy Knight Frank,

There were 20 shophouse deals in Q1, with 17 freehold units and three leasehold units sold; in the previous quarter, 16 shophouses were sold, based on Knight Frank’s data.

Six deals were signed above S$10 million in Q1, three of which were above S$15 million.

Knight Frank said that the hiking of the property stamp duty for foreigners last year for residential purchases boosted investor interest in commercial shophouses among family offices, since the properties can serve as both assets and offices. 

This is despite slower rates of shophouse sales and the opening of new family offices since money laundering investigation in Singapore started last August.

In 2021, sales of shophouses hit a record at S$1.9 billion, with the average price of a property rising from S$5 million to S$8 million to S$15 million to S$20 million over the past decade, the consultancy said.

It projects the sales volume of shophouses to be between S$1.1 billion and S$1.2 billion for the rest of 2024.

Read More

share this article!

TESLA founder Elon Musk told tech investors in Paris on Thursday he opposed US tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), an about-face from his January warning that trade barriers were needed or China would “demolish most other car companies in the world.”

On Thursday, Musk said he did not favour measures that distorted the market.

This month, US President Joe Biden rolled out new tariffs on an array of Chinese imports, including EVs, seeking to support American manufacturing.

The Biden administration has maintained a number of tariffs introduced by former President Donald Trump, while ratcheting up others, including quadrupling EV duties to more than 100 per cent. The White House said the new measures affect US$18 billion in imported Chinese goods.

“Neither Tesla nor I asked for these tariffs, in fact I was surprised when they were announced. Things that inhibit freedom of exchange or distort the market are not good,” Musk said at the Viva Technology conference in Paris via video link.

“Tesla competes quite well in the market in China with no tariffs and no deferential support. I’m in favour of no tariffs,” Musk said.

In January, Musk warned Chinese automakers would “demolish” global competitors without trade barriers.

“If there are no trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world,” Musk said in a post-earnings analyst call at the start of the year.

Leading tech executives and political figures such as ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former US climate envoy John Kerry took to the stage this year at the annual VivaTech conference.

Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of Musk-owned social media platform X, is expected to participate in-person on Friday for a panel discussion on the future of content. REUTERS

Read More

share this article!

NEW Zealand’s central bank decided to hold the cash rate at 5.5 per cent this week because its monetary policy committee remained confident medium-term inflation would return to its 1 to 3 per cent target, deputy governor Christian Hawkesby said on Friday (May 24).

Hawkesby said that cutting interest rates is not a part of near-term policy discussion due to factors that need to be worked through before the bank could “shift that conversation to whether we should hold or cut”.

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) on Wednesday held the cash rate as expected but wrongfooted markets by warning cuts were unlikely until far into 2025 as it battles stubborn domestic inflation.

The RBNZ forecasts also upped the risk the central bank would hike the cash rate one more time before it begins cutting.

Hawkesby said it would not be one single piece of data that determined the case for a rate hike but rather the impact of that data on the outlook for domestic inflation and inflation expectations.

Consumer price inflation surprised on the high side at 4.0 per cent in the first quarter, while domestic inflation stood at 5.8 per cent. The central bank has raised concerns that factors including local government taxes and insurance continue to push up prices.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty about the tradables inflation going forward,” Hawkesby added. “To some extent, we are going to have to take that as given and use our monetary polity tools to influence core inflation pressures.”

Hawkesby added while the economy was slowing, inflation expectations were likely to remain higher for longer because of past experience.

“So to get those inflation expectations down, they actually need to be dragged down for a period by the economy cooling off,” he said. REUTERS

Read More

share this article!

MARKETS fell in Asia on Friday, tracking a sell-off on Wall Street sparked by a string of better-than-expected US data that added to worries the Federal Reserve will hold off on cutting interest rates this year.

A weeks-long rally in equities has petered out in the past few days on profit-taking and as central bank officials pushed back against bets on an early reduction.

Confidence was dealt a further blow Thursday as a closely watched gauge of the services sector showed services activity rose at its fastest pace in a year, while the factory sector also beat forecasts.

Meanwhile, fewer people than estimated made unemployment claims, suggesting the labour market remains tight.

The readings indicated the world’s top economy was still in rude health, quelling the excitement sparked by last week’s news that the consumer price index slowed in April after three months of topping forecasts.

“The data erase some of the cooling signals in recent outcomes and contrast the month-long run of broader US data tending to surprise on the soft side,” said Taylor Nugent of National Australia Bank.

The figures came after minutes from the Fed’s May policy decision showed decision-makers wanted to keep borrowing costs elevated until they are confident prices are under control, while some even said they were willing to hike again.

FHN Financial’s Chris Low said: “The minutes are a reminder that while the Fed does not see another rate hike as likely – and certainly does not see it as a base-case – it will not rule out hikes if inflation does not behave.”

All three main indexes in New York ended in the red, and Asia followed suit.

Hong Kong fell for a fourth straight day, having hit a nine-month high earlier in the week, while there were also losses in Tokyo, Shanghai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Wellington, Taipei and Manila.

The prospect of interest rates remaining at two-decade highs through most of the year put upward pressure on the dollar.

Investors are paying particular attention to the yen after Japanese officials recently stepped into forex markets when it hit a 34-year low against the greenback.

The Japanese unit was also weighed by data showing inflation eased last month, leading to speculation about when the country’s central bank will lift interest rates again, having hiked in March for the first time in 17 years.

The slowdown in prices will not “deter financial markets from speculating on further Bank of Japan policy tightening”, said Kristina Clifton, at Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

But she added that “at this stage, we expect the BoJ to wait until around October before increasing interest rates again”. AFP

Read More

share this article!

CHINA’S efforts to bolster economic growth by reducing the allure of bank deposits has driven a record exodus from cash, with a big proportion of that going into bonds and wealth management products.

The nation’s total deposits slumped by 3.9 trillion yuan (S$728 billion), or 1.3 per cent, in April as investors looked for higher returns elsewhere and policymakers cracked down on companies that took advantage of preferential deposit rates to park cash at banks. One-year deposits at China’s largest banks pay a record-low of just 1.45 per cent.

The rush of funds into higher-yielding assets indicates efforts by Chinese policymakers to boost risk appetite are starting to bear fruit, though the money has yet to translate into a jump in consumer spending or stock investment.

“Factors, including an end of arbitrage borrowings, have vastly driven the reallocation of deposits, and it’s expected to continue,” said Ming Ming, chief economist at Citic Securities in Beijing. “People are withdrawing their savings to spend and invest, and that’s something that policymakers will be glad to see.”

The outstanding value of wealth management products jumped by 2.95 trillion yuan in April, with the biggest gains being made by fixed-income assets, according to Citic’s analysis. Exchange-traded funds tracking Chinese bonds attracted inflows of US$428 million in the same month, the most since December, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Rampant retail demand for China’s first batch of special government bonds pushed up the price of the securities by as much as 25 per cent on their debut this week, triggering trading halts. At the same time, the one-year bond yield has dropped close to lows last seen in mid-2020.

There are signs too that at least some of the displaced money has found its way into stocks, principally those with higher payouts that are considered safer. The Shanghai Stock Exchange Dividend Index has climbed 16 per cent this year, and last month reached the highest level since 2015. That compares with a gain of only about 6 per cent in the benchmark gauge.

Both Chinese bonds and stocks have been rallying for months, with investors betting the central bank will ease monetary policy further while a slew of government support measures will help support the recovery. Still, lingering concerns over the uncertain economic outlook mean investors have preferred dividend stocks over those linked with growth.

Policymakers last month prohibited banks from offering preferred deposit rates to companies, thereby ending their practice of borrowing money at lower rates elsewhere to make risk-free returns by arbitrage. Meanwhile, to get people to spend, the government has worked with state-owned banks to push down savings rates.

Of the 3.9 trillion yuan slide in total deposits in April, 1.9 trillion yuan were in the form of withdrawals by households, according to central-bank data.

“Funds that were sitting in deposits switching over to wealth management products has been the biggest change in the market recently,” said Chen Yicong, managing director at Beijing Chengyang Asset Management. They are “mostly purchasing fixed-income products such as government bonds, local-government-financing-vehicle debt, and certificates of deposits”, he said.

Still, this bond-buying cannot be sustainable as it will eventually push yields too low, Chen said. “The bigger trend, which is that a broader source of funds will seek a haven in risk assets through dividend stocks is here to stay. Even if they are not yet buying riskier stocks.”

While the inflows into bonds will help Beijing and Chinese companies fund investments, easing pressure on banks to extend loans, it’s also a sign of low confidence among households. Years of stock market losses and a slumping property sector have eroded wealth and sapped the animal spirit of China’s army of retail investors.

“It’s a reflection of generally weak confidence in the economy and income prospects, so people would be chasing higher returns, even just petty profits, across asset classes, rather than boosting consumption, which is really what authorities wanted,” said Shen Meng, a director at Beijing-based investment bank Chanson & Co. “I’d expect that to continue in the near future, and if the capital market gains aren’t sustained, investors might move their money back into bank deposits again.”

Others also see the new dynamic lasting for another few months at least.

“The increase in deposit withdrawals will continue and the growth of loans will decline” in coming months as the authorities want to tap so-called idle cash for loan payments, said Xing Zhaopeng, senior China strategist at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group. That said, regulators will also frown on the money going into speculative bets on government bonds, he said. BLOOMBERG

Read More

share this article!

ALIBABA Group Holding has raised US$4.5 billion from a convertible bond sale, in one of the largest such offerings in recent years, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The Hangzhou-based company priced the seven-year notes, due 2031, with a coupon of 0.5 per cent and a conversion premium of 30 per cent, the sources said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. Orders for the bonds were multiple times oversubscribed, with demand from investors globally, one of the sources said.

A representative for Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The offering comes as Alibaba needs capital to invest in its core businesses of e-commerce and the cloud, both of which have bled market share during a crackdown on the sector by Chinese authorities and subsequent internal turmoil. Rival Chinese online retailer JD.com earlier in the week sold US$1.75 billion of convertible bonds due in five years.

Alibaba is seeking to strike a balance between returning cash and investing in existing and new businesses, including in artificial intelligence, chairman Joe Tsai and chief executive officer Eddie Wu said in a letter to shareholders on Thursday (May 23). The firm approved an expansion of a share buyback programme earlier this year, adding US$25 billion in stock repurchases – one of the largest ever in China.

The company marketed the convertible bonds at an annual coupon of 0.25 to 0.75 per cent, and at a 30 to 35 per cent conversion premium, according to terms of the deal reviewed by Bloomberg News earlier. Alibaba plans to use the proceeds to fund stock buybacks, it said on Thursday, confirming a Bloomberg News report.

The offering – which the company said includes a so-called greenshoe option that could increase the deal size by US$500 million – adds to an already busy month for convertible bond issuance. Globally, there have been US$10.2 billion worth of such deals this month, dwarfing April’s US$4 billion tally, after a pause for the earnings season interrupted a string of US$10 billion plus months, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Part of the proceeds from the offering will be used to repurchase some of Alibaba’s American depositary receipts (ADRs) at the time of the pricing, as well as to fund future buybacks. Alibaba’s ADRs closed down 2.3 per cent at US$80.80 on Thursday.

Alibaba did not outline the scope of the share repurchase in its statement, but the source familiar with the situation said that Alibaba will buy back 14.8 million ADRs, or about US$1.2 billion worth of shares, concurrent to the offering.

Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Barclays and HSBC Holdings helped arrange the deal, according to terms seen earlier by Bloomberg News. BLOOMBERG

Read More

share this article!