Alibaba Intends To Borrow Billions Of Dollars From Banks For Takeovers

Alibaba is holding negotiations to borrow $4 billion from a number of banks to finance its investments and takeovers.

Alibaba Group holds discussions with banking organizations to receive a loan of $4 billion to finance growth plans, including acquisitions. The plans of the Chinese e-commerce company to increase its capacity followed its expenditure worth billions of dollars on takeovers and investment in the past year in markets abroad and in China.

The deliberations, involving many banks, began with plans to borrow a loan worth $3 billion but a billion dollars could be added to the amount. A source stated that the loan would be finalized.

The largest online trading organization of China has boosted its investments in a huge range of businesses, from electronic payments in India to logistical partners and mobile applications in China. In June, Hangzhou-based organization and its financial service affiliate said they would jointly invest approximately $1 billion in food-ordering application ‘Koubei’ to make it an extensive facility that connects with conventional businesses, such as restaurants.

Two months later, the online retailer announced to spend around $4.5bn for approximately 20% share in Suning Commerce Group as an effort to improve its logistics by collaborating with a huge conventional retail chain.

In November, Alibaba said to turn Youku Tudou into a wholly owned division in an agreement that value the Chinese online video service provider at around $4.4 billion. In India, the company invested in One97 Communications and Snapdeal. One97 Communications runs a leading local electronic payment service known as Paytm.

In other news, The Hilltop News reported that Winslow Capital Management LLC has increased its stake in Alibaba by 28% in the final quarter, revealed by its funds filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The fund owned 4,883,053 shares of the organization after purchasing 1,067,782 extra shares during that period. 20% of the shares of Alibaba worth $396.845 in last quarter.

Recently, a large number of other huge fund managers and institutional investors also lowered or increased their shares in the company. In the final quarter, Vontobel Asset Management increased position in Alibaba by 111.5%.

Vontobel Asset Management now owns 7,178,120 shares of the company, worth a sum of $591,805,000, after purchasing 3,784,821 extra shares during the final quarter. A new position was purchased by USS Investment Management in the enterprise during the final quarter worth around $77,694,000.

In the final quarter, Russel Frank Co. added to its stake by 41.9%. It currently owns 1,945,836 shares of the stock worth $159.04million after purchasing 574,117 extra shares during the final quarter. In other news, Bloomberg reported that Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma and Vice President Joseph Tsai will bolster the stock buyback of the company. They have decided to spend their owned money in buying stock worth $500 million as a part of their efforts to show their confidence in the online marketplace operator. 

Amazon Acquires NICE For Customers To Manage Visualization Workloads Effectively

Amazon strives to strengthen web services business by acquiring businesses.

Amazon announced in recent times that an Italian ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) company, NICE, which makes products for clients to centralize and optimize their visualization workloads and high performance computation. In September 2015, the ecommerce company had purchased backend mobile video service, Elemental Technology, at a price of $500 million to strengthen its cloud infrastructure facilities provided by its web facilities unit.

Forbes estimated that Amazon Web Services contributes to almost 30% of its value and is organization’s most profitable unit. Strategic takeovers to strengthen this unit’s offerings are essential to retain and attract clients, increase revenues and have a positive impact on the company’s valuation.

Recently, Ericsson announced an international services, technology and business alliance with AWS to speed up cloud transformation for telecommunication service providers. This must add to the revenues of AWS and act as a catalyst for expansion of its telecom cloud industry, provided Ericsson’s huge customer base.

Although NICE is a niche business, its offered service, Desktop Cloud Visualization software, offered game designers and 3D developers to work remotely from every type of product.

The acquired software will allow the Seattle based organization to improve its offered services for customers with high CPU performance requirement, such as 3D developers. In addition to this intellectual property, the online retailer will also reach European customers of NICE, which has clients in sectors ranging from utilities to aerospace and energy.

NICE boasts customers like Chevron, Yale University, Toyota and Airbus. Constellation Research revealed that AWS stands to get much from this agreement and the attained intellectual property, which has equipped it with the capacity to add to entire Amazon marketplace through specific fresh functionality.

Ericsson said it is collaborating with Amazon’s cloud service for telecommunication service providers to seize opportunities like big data analytics and IoT to use the recently introduced technologies and enhance efficiency and productivity. In its collaboration with AWS, the Swedish tech company expects to converge mobile cloud and infrastructure, and offer new capabilities to service providers and app developers to speed up innovation.

Ericsson is developing an international expert team, which is not only focusing on AWS cloud but also setting up cloud innovation centers with clients. Fortune believes that this tie up will add to the revenues of AWS as its customers adapt to this new offering.

According to the partnership, Ericsson has also planned to develop solutions for service providers to develop and enhance capacities.

Uber Now offers Motorcycle Taxi Service In Bangkok

Uber provides motorbike cab service in Bangkok to dominate the transportation market of a region where it's rivals are leading.

Uber has begun offering its very first bike cab service in Bangkok. A city in which perennial congestion causes rush-hour traffic speeds in the capital of Thailand of only 11 kmph. The American application based taxi service provider that started to serve as a limousine facility in the affluent San Francisco Bay Area is now interested in tackling the automobiles that a large number of Bangkok's residents depend on streets that have been jam-packed with traffic.

It states it is capable of untangling the traffic snarls resulting in two-hour daily travel. The measure might also play a role in boosting the presence of Uber in an area where its chief competitors’ coalition leads. Grab continues to lead most of the Southeast Asian region, and successfully established ranks with Didi Kuaidi of China, Ola of India and hometown competitor of Uber technologies ‘Lyft’ to predict its growth in the area.

Aggressive global growth has been embarked by the startup, aided by lots of money in financing that boosted the valuation of the startup to $60bn – the largest amongst privately managed tech startups. CEO Travis Kalanick aggressively spent to grow the international network of the transporter and enter the Grab’s markets in the regions, from Vietnam and Malaysia to Singapore. Recently, in Philippines it started to offer “uberHOP” which offers commuters heading towards similar direction during rush hours in return for a flat fare.

Up till now, it been sticking to knitting, developing network of driving partners with more vans and cars. Thailand might prove to be ideal country to examine a network of motorcycles. Three-wheeled automobiles and motorcycle cabs are often sighted across the state and are a part of the urban life. The “UberMOTO” facility will play catch-up to own Grab Taxi Holdings Pte's competing service. In other parts of the region, Go-Jek is leading the motorcycle cab market of Indonesia

Ride sharing businesses continue to run their operations in an ill-defined region in a large number of states when it comes to enabling of privately owned automobiles to offer paid transportation facility, an activity conventionally confined to rental companies and licensed cabs.

The American startup nevertheless collaborates with the traffic police of Thailand to make people aware regarding motorcycle security – including the need to wear helmets and is promising to screen all those who log up for riding a motorbike to provide its new facility appropriately.

Uber claimed to be the economical option in the area by charging fares starting at only 28 U.S cents (10 baht). 

Tesla Powerwall Makes its Debut in South Africa

Tesla Motors has begun selling its Powerwall in South Africa at price of thousands of Rands for growing in the region

The installation of the first Tesla Powerwall has taken place in Johannesburg, South Africa, stated authorized reseller Dako Power. The electric vehicle maker planned to use and gather data based on its initial unit’s ability to promote the rechargeable lithium ion battery when it’s introduced at The Solar Show Africa in March, said Peter Dalgish, Managing Director at Dako Power.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is being hailed for using power in the future as it stores for household consumption, load shedding and back up electricity. The 7KWH daily cycle Powerwall technology offered in South Africa market, stores and harnesses power generated by solar panels during the night and day use and during blackouts.

Tesla has revealed that the lithium ion Power wall which succeeds in operating at an efficiency rate of 92%, can supply 3.3 kilowatt of continuous electricity equivalent to its peak production. It states in an ordinary home lights per room consume 0.1 kilowatt per hour of power per hour while 1.6 kilowatt per hour is consumed per day.

Peter stated: a fully operating system consists of solar panels totaling at a dozen as well as a five kilowatt per hour inverter, converting direct electricity from solar panels into alternating power for taxes, installation and residential use in the area of R200,000. This amount depends on the ZAR/ USD exchange rate.

Another South African reseller Rubicon has offered different Tesla Powerwall packages for at a least price of R116 000 to R272 000 , excluding installation and VAT, business tech reported.

According to Peter, the largest benefit of Powerwall usage in comparison to the remaining affordable devices is warranties. The extension of the guarantee offered by the automaker for its battery system can done be from one decade to 2 decades whereas a two and a half decade extended warranty has come with a SolaEdge inverter.

The warranties offered for other devices are typically ranging between half a decade to decade. Although the California based company has only started to ship the Powerwall, Elon stated in a product’s second version  “which will see further step changes in capabilities” would be offered in August or July in 2016.

Peter stated the upgrade’s news has not had an impact on the interest in the battery system’s model. In other news, uberizgmo has reported that an up dation has been done by the American automaker to its referral scheme and everyone who refers to anyone who procures a new Tesla Model S will be provided an opportunity to visit the Head office of SpaceX established in Los Angeles.

The fact that the head office of SpaceX isn’t accessible for the public has made this incentive more special. 5 referrers  will be awarded with a visit for 4 to the head office of the Space company.

Temasek Cuts Stake In Alibaba While Buying Rival Shares

Temasek Holdings pares its stake in Alibaba as it buys new shares of its domestic rival 'JD.com'

Alibaba Group Holding is the biggest and largest Chinese e-commerce company, which took over the online shopping space of the region by storm. Being one of the biggest tech firms in the world, several investors buy shares in it. One of the shareholders is Singapore’s Temasek Holdings Pte.

According to Bloomberg, the Singaporean investment firm has decided to cut back its stake in the Chinese online retailer ‘Alibaba’ in the fourth quarter. This move comes as Temasek Holdings buys shares of other Chinese tech companies that also includes Alibaba’s rival, JD.com.

It seems like Temasek dropped stake of Alibaba while buying shares of its domestic rival, which is rapidly improving its market position and is a real threat to Alibaba Group in China. Bloomberg added that the Singapore’s government-owned investment firm sold nearly 548,769 receipts of American depositary in the Chinese tech giant.

According to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the group stated on Tuesday that it is left now with 47.5 million. The holding was previously valued at $1.03 billion, which significantly jumped to $3.86 billion when the shares rose by 38% in the fourth quarter.

Reports suggest that the new Temasek’s acquisitions include 6.1 million ADRs in JD.com, the closest competitor of Alibaba and 8.2 million ADRs in a renowned Chinese online travel company, called Tuniu Corp.

Temasek is confident of the future of China’s technology sector and industries. The investment firm first invested in Alibaba  in 2011 where it bought China registered shares valued at $36 million (S$50 million).

Amidst the dying economy of China, Alibaba struggled to grow its business in the past months. Jack Ma remained positive throughout though. On the other hand, its rival JD.com significantly grew its market share, which threatened the Chinese e-commerce giant and its position in the market. The year-on-year revenue growth of JD.com was 52% during the three months ended in September whereas Alibaba’s revenue growth was only 32% in the same duration.

Guo adds that it will be exciting to see the battle between two retail businesses of the country. Alibaba already has a strong market position but the massive growth of JD.com has lured customers toward its online marketplace.

Apart from the online tech firms, Temasek also holds stakes in different pharmaceutical companies that includes Gilead Sciences Inc. (1.4 million shares), BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc. (888,545 shares), and Quintiles Transnational Holdings Inc. (639,172 shares). 

Google Takes its Innovation To Singapore

Google Inc. is making its first move in Singapore to provide better ways to communicate and connect.

Google Inc. has achieved great success in the Indian market, now it is making its first move in Southeast Asia mainly because it’s a huge region; the search engine giant believes that it has made numerous lives better by making them aware of its innovative initiatives that have helped people connect. The latest move by the company is aimed at Singapore, according to a blog post by Google. It will be building an engineering team in the region.

The search engine giant has already started to work on the project in Singapore as it has acquihired Pie.com – this process of acquihiring means that the company has hired to company to use its skills and expertise and has not been bought for its products or services. Pie.com is a startup that started back in 2013 which is based in Singapore and works on messaging software that people use at their offices. They work on making employees work more fun and communication at work interesting – the startup believes that work should be ‘fun fast and easy to use’. The chief executive officer of Pie.com is Thijs Jacobs and has over nine team members. 

The startup is expected to integrate completely with Google right after March 2 as on that day it will be required to cease its operations, as per the deal between the two companies. Pie’s management and Google have not yet made the financial agreements of the deal public. But the startup raised as much as $1.2 million last year in Series A funding via Gree Venture.

The search engine corporation has quite serious about its project in the Southeast Asian market as it is making quite an effort to look for engineering talent as the post also stated that the company is accepting applications from recent graduates to pursue a career at the world’s largest search engine corporation. Additional to these jobs opening,

It is also offering an internship program to attract the most talented lot amongst these graduates. It will be a 12-week internship program which is likely to take place in Australia and is aiming at people and engineers who want to have a career at the company in Singapore. They want the Singapore team to comprise of the best talent they can find so they are also encouraging their Singaporean employees who are working abroad to join the team in their own country. This invitation is not limited to the nationals but outsiders as well who would want to be transferred to the region.

Alphabet Stock is being traded for $717.51 per share presently showing a decline of $1.98% from its previous trading session. During this session, the stock price went as high as $736.00 and as low as 715.55. However, the twelve month high was reported to be $810.35 and the 52-week low was reported to be $529.00. The market capital right now is at $495.57 billion with earnings per share of $22.82 along with a price to earnings ratio of $31.44. The institutional own as many as 85% of the share of the search engine company.

Facebook Instant Articles Load Pages Faster For Publisher

By loading websites for publications faster, Instant Articles would attract them towards itself and save their time.

Facebook is opening its platform Instant Articles for any publication from April 12 onwards. The question is remaining that whether publishers are finding Instant Articles useful for them or anything detrimental they will have to adopt or leave behind.

Since its introduction in May, the company had directly worked with partnered publications for ensuring that they get on board with the option responsible for loading their webpages at a faster pace inside the Facebook app, rather than inside a web browser.

Now publications will be provided an opportunity for configuring Instant Articles by themselves using the company's documentation. Instant Articles is combining desire of the organization to highly benefit from a better user experience. The program is effectively barring exits from the social network.

Instead of compelling people to wait for the sluggish loading of websites, which leads them to close the app due to frustration and visit another webpage after, Instant Articles keep people within the platform where they connect with their friends and view advertisements.

The social network operator may have announced Instant Articles extension on February 18, 2015, as Google would probably introduce its similar Accelerated Mobile Pages products later this month. Nevertheless, they would not turn into rivals, as publications will have an opportunity to use Google’s open-ended AMP program to speed up their webpages for traffic and use Instant Articles for offering a better quality experience for the visitors referred by the social network giant.

Still an open question regarding what Instant Articles affect for publishers. Facebook is significantly restricting the number of advertisements that publishers are capable of showing in Instant Articles.

In the meantime, the stripped down design format is capable of removing significant links that play an important role in redirecting traffic to other posts of publishers, which persuades people for signing up for newsletters, purchasing event tickets and paying for subscriptions.

Wall Street Journal reported that some publications are currently receiving as much money for a tap on an Instant Article as done by them from a page. This does not take the decreased chances to get subsequent page views into the account.

Facebook separates every advertisement by 350 words in the article and if the article primarily includes media or pictures, advertisements should not surpass 15% of the content. It is applied to these “house ads” that are promoting a publication’s own monetization or content.

Essentially, whereas these publishers might find many people who are clicking on their links to read their stories actually due to their faster loading, they might get few monetization opportunities for secondary clicks.

Amazon Buys Emvantage Payments For Online Payment Platform In India

Amazon has acquired Indian payment service company 'Emvantage Payments' for an undisclosed amount.

Amazon has purchased the Indian payment service provider ‘Emvantage Payments’. It is not a secret that the American e-commerce company has betted on India amongst its next huge markets located outside the United States.

The company is not only investing capital in India but also purchasing emerging companies to extend its foothold in the state. On Tuesday, the Seattle based company announced the acquisition of the Indian organization. Like PayPal or Stripe, Emvantage allows online sellers to accept debit and credit cards. It also allows establishing their branded prepaid mobile payments and debit cards.

The online retailer said the acquired organization would help it to develop the payment facility for online business in the country faster. Workers of Emvantage will become members of Payment team of Amazon to specifically establish payments products to cater the market of India.

In recent times, the online trading giant spoke to Vivian Walt of Fortune that after the United States, India would turn into its largest market within a decade. An official of Amazon, Diego Piacentini, stated Amazon’s sales opportunity is worth trillions of dollars. Recently Morgan Stanley forecasted that e-commerce sector is capable of increasing its revenue from $11 billion in 2013 to $137 billion in 2020.

The main factor that will help this growth will be to enable people to pay for goods through mobile phones and internet simply by taping a button or swiping. India vastly differs from US in terms of online payments and credit cards. Just 60% Indians have bank accounts and a tiny portion of those people is owners of credit cards.

The acquisition will improve the ambitions of Amazon to develop a payments technology that helps the population of India and provide it an opportunity to grow in the country. Emvantage has pioneered a range of payments solutions that include pre-paid cards, mobile payment, and payment gateway.

Amazon has not revealed the price at which it has purchased the Asian organization. Tech crunch reported that in 2020, the worth of Indian e-commerce market would reach $100 billion. In the region, a large number of online buyers use online wallets to pay for goods purchased online.

Cash paid on delivery, pre-paid cards and conventional stores are the options that are much more availed by consumers than online wallets. Alibaba-backed online payment service provider ‘Paytm’ has offered its own mobile wallet as an alternate to debit and credit cards, but it battles with many payment services owned by the major online trading players of India. 

Alibaba Bought 5.6% Stake in Groupon

The online retailer has succeeded in buying a stake of 5.6% in Groupon for penetrating into the US E-commerce market

Alibaba Group Holding Limited has purchased 5.6% share in Groupon, turning it into the fourth biggest shareholder in the online deal webpage, a regulatory filing has recently revealed. The online retailer was required to file its stake as it had reached a particular limit.

This means that the Chinese electronic commerce company now owns 33 million shares of the American company. The shares of the Chicago based company were still decreased by 61% in the past one year, despite of an increase by 29% in the last week on Friday.

Apart from Groupon, the online trading giant has also purchased shares in other organizations such as tech start up Magic Leap, online retailer Jet.com and a transportation network enterprise Lyft. The Hangzhou based company has refused to share its views regarding the filing. In the meantime, spokesperson of Groupon Bill Roberts has stated the enterprise is not aware of the stake of Alibaba, not until the regulatory filing disclosed on 12^th February 2016.

On Thursday, the online dealer reported its final quarter results that succeeded in surpassing predictions made by analysts due to rising sales in the North American region. Groupon stated it recorded a profit of 4 cents per share, surpassing analysts’ estimations that the company would reach break-even point.

Groupon has stopped operating in 17 states and is presently operating in 28 as it has continued to do streamlining of its operations across the globe. It was previous known as one of the most popular Internet brands, becoming famous by following a business model that helped it play a role of a broker between consumers and conventional retailers, offering huge discounts from merchants such as movie theaters and restaurants.

It’s rapid growth took place at a time when the group purchasing sites in China boomed, and the US company used to be a Chinese group purchasing site’s co-owner in collaboration with China based internet company Tencent.

But that was followed by the fading of the group purchasing sector almost as rapidly as it grew, leading  the star of Groupon to get dimmed and number of its China imitators to enter the market .

In the later part of 2011, Groupon was successful with a high profile initial public offering when it used to be an emerging star, offering its shares at a price of $20 and reaching a market value of around $12 billion.

For a short period of time, it’s shares reached a price of $31 shortly after it began to trade in the stock market, but have decreased in terms of value since then due to its failure to find a method to increase and recorded lackluster growth of revenue.

Even after the huge rise in recent times, its shares are now trading at around 85% less than their IPO level.

Facebook Re-Integrates SMS Support To Messenger

Facebook is testing the integration of SMS support back to Messenger.

Facebook now tests the integration of SMS support back into Messenger. If one uses Messenger before 2013, he/she might recall that the American social media service provider initially used to include the integration of SMS in Messenger. Nevertheless, during November 2013, it got rid of the feature claiming that not many people use the feature.

Earlier, the SMS feature used to let users text to friends that were not using Facebook Messenger. Currently, the test of the feature is open to only a handful of Android users in the North American region. To see and check the existence of the feature on Android device, user should simply find the “Change SMS App” option inside the Messenger setting.

Apart from the short messaging service test, the company launched a new feature to facilitate Android users by providing a single device with multiple account support. Instead of compelling multiple users to login and out each time, Messenger launched a switch over between account profiles on a device.

This is proved useful when only one device is shared among friends, family, and business – where a company-owned device is passed amongst workers. This feature is now offered to users of Android system across the world and is capable of being activated by adding people in account settings.

Venture Beat reported that the social network acknowledged of developing a ‘short messaging service’ integration feature. Messenger might also incorporate an Instagram-styled multiple accounts sign-in feature, which would allow users to toggle between several accounts through their settings.

Instagram launched the feature that was mainly aimed at its more socially and prolific users like brands and celebs. The addition of potential multiple accounts to Messenger might also play a role in increasing the revenue of the organization by enticing more advertising from top brands.

Reports also hinted that Messenger might shift to a blue bar for adding a little color to its currently offered white template and firmly associate it with the distinctive “big blue” of its huge giant.

The possibility to offer extra features alongside the service is raising the question that whether the incorporation of similar features might be done to WhatsApp as well. The members of technology community argued over the possibility of getting WhatsApp incorporated with multiple accounts support.

BBC News reported that Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckberg responded to the pro colonialism tweet of the organization's early investor, Marc Andreessen, by writing, "I found the comments deeply upsetting. They do not represent the way Facebook or I think at all." Andreessen has removed the tweet.