China's largest e commerce company, the Alibaba Group has purchased a 28% share in AutoNavi Holdings Ltd, the digital mapping company. This is part of Alibaba's activity to increase competitiveness in expanding the product lineup of the firm.
Alibaba remains privately owned and would be investing US$294 million of its own money to become the largest shareholder in AutoNavi. This was confirmed by AutoNavi confirming an earlier report from the news portal Sina.
Alibaba is now in deep competition with Tencent Holdings as the latter acquired 18% of the microblogging service of Sina Corp, Weibo. This is the Chinese equivalent to Twitter and the transaction would be completed by the end of April.
Many industry analysts are expecting Alibaba to go public by this year and the projected valuation for the firm could be as high as Facebook Inc's valuation of US$100 billion.
When news broke of Alibaba's interest in AutoNavi, shares prices of AutoNavi have increased by as much as 30% since May started and now is priced at US$14.77 per share.
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