Alibaba Empire Expand to Offline: Leads $2.6bn Bid for Chinese Retailer Intime

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. recently announced that they would privatize Intime Retail, a leading China department store and mall operator. Alibaba will take big steps offline with $2.6 billion Intime deal.

Alibaba Executive Chairman Jack Ma & Intime Retail founder Shen Guo Jun

Alibaba currently owns 28 percent of Intime following an initial investment in the retailer in 2014. If shareholders approve the deal, Alibaba would become the controlling shareholder of Intime with an expected stake of approximately 74 percent. Alibaba estimated the maximum amount of cash required to complete the deal at approximately HK$19.8 billion ($2.6 billion).

Since the growing slowly electricity economic market, Alibaba started to explore other new economic growth points. And it laid a solid foundation for Alibaba to retail entity economy. Apart from Intime, Alibaba has partnered with electronics chains Suning and Haier in deals that expanded its own online offerings and sales and delivery network.

    

The proposal, announced Monday, calls for an Alibaba subsidiary to team up with an entity wholly owned by Intime Retail founder Shen Guo Jun to buy out Intime shareholders and take the Hong Kong stock exchange listed company private. Under the proposal, the buyers will pay HK$10 per share for Intime stock, a 42 percent premium over the closing price of HK$7.03 on Dec. 28, 2016, before trading of Intime shares was suspended.

“This deal shows that there is still value to brick-and-mortar stores, enough to interest e-commerce players,” said Catherine Lim, a Singapore-based analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. What it's shown is that department store chains are still relevant and of value. We could be seeing renewal of a sunset industry.

“Alibaba will be able to do more experiments with Intime in the retail sector,” said Ray Zhao, a Shenzhen-based analyst at Guotai Junan Securities Co. “Intime’s valuation is relatively low now so it would be a good time to buy.”

image credit: Business Insider

Alibaba is also trying to develop overseas market. On this Monday, the pledge from Alibaba Executive Chairman Jack Ma came during a 40-minute New York meeting with U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump. Speaking to reporters afterwards, Trump said, “we had a great meeting…and (he’s) a great, great entrepreneur, one of the best in the world, and he loves this country, and he loves China.” Alibaba pledged to create 1 million U.S. jobs with him.

Bidding to Intime is based on a series of acquisitions on the past. Alibaba conducted 35 times acquisitions in the past 12 months, which value of $15.2 billion totally.

“We don’t divide the world into real or virtual economies, only the old and the new. Those who cling on to the old ways of retailing will be disrupted, and brick-and-mortar businesses will be able to create value for consumers if they are integrated with the power of mobile reach, real-time consumer insights, and technology capability to improve operating efficiency.”

“The most important opportunity on the horizon is not growing online sales in isolation but rather helping traditional retailers upgrade into a brand new retail model,” CEO Zhang said in October.

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Was Your Yahoo/Tumblr Account Hacked? Save It Now!

Yahoo said one billion user accounts will be affected because of a hacking incident. If you just watched the news that Yahoo got hacked, this article is for you to protect your account.

Why these things happened?

As you login frequently to your social account, be it from your mobile, computer, office workstation or laptop, you may leave the social account unattended. Some people like to get money, pleasure by looking into other persons’ social account because they have nothing to do in their life. Twitter is the main target of hackers. Hacking has been hitting the global scale and social networking websites. They can make your privacy public even menace your daily life. So here are some tips about how you can protect your social accounts better. Just follow it!

Have a secure password

First and most important is to change your password right now. As billions of accounts are affected, you can’t know whether you are the one or not. So the most effective way is changing your password immediately. That would help if you use different and complicated password for your each social account. For example, “@Tanco95Charlie” is a complicated password with words, numbers and symbols. Never use words which are part of your user ID or your account name. Also changing your password frequently can avoid unauthorized access. 

Use third-party apps with caution

In your social account settings, see which services were previously given permission to integrate with your account. Cancel access to any you don't use frequently or those that actually ask for your private information. In the PC, try to avoid any third party web toolbars apart from the trusted ones, because some malicious toolbars programmed to read your key strikes which often comes free with smileys or other stuff do contains a code. But you can use virtual keyboard to avoid it.

Don't click on dubious links

You will come across many scams and dubious links. Do not follow such links as they try to hack your account. When you find appalling messages in the status update, Google and check it before proceeding further would be much better. Never click on dubious links even they come from your friends. Always take an extra step to confirm can protect your account better.

Other tips

If you still worry about your account, you can run a virus detection program to find the virus and destroy it. Remember to sign out every time after your use your social account on shared computer, office workstation or other public place.

image from internet

What did you do after you read one though you've seen many articles like this in the past? Did you change your passwords or check your bank accounts? Request a new PIN for your debit card? No? You should think about doing all of those.

After all, hackers are going to continue attacking financial institutions and retail stores in pursuit of account numbers, passwords, Social Security numbers...and there's not much you can do about that. But that doesn't mean you have to wait for it to happen.

By taking a few proactive steps, you can increase your awareness and take steps that will make it harder for hackers to do their dirty work. Also if you know any other options or methods please do share with us here.

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China's Retail Sales Tops the Year in November

China as the world's No. 2 economy has reportedly gained its hugest retail sales growth in November, which suggests the national economy is healthy and would stabilize for a span of time.

image from internet

With a rocky start to this year, China's economy has performed better than expected and has the possibility to hit Beijing's 6.5% - 7% growth target under the condition with higher government spending and a sizzling housing market fuel a construction boom. Factory output has raised 6.2% off last year, above the views for 6.1%.

Retail sales lifted 10.8%, which is the fastest off last December and topping forecasts for 10.1%. Online sales grow also, thanks to the Singles Day. E-Commerce giant Alibaba witnessed record sales on that day, whose rival competitor JD and Wechat’s Tencent also had greater sales performance, which all have surpassed US’s Black Friday & Cyber Monday on online sales.

Fixed asset investment in urban areas also rose 8.3% from January to November. Despite faster growth & productivity in the private sector, state-run enterprises keep dominating the section of investment & credit. SOE’s fixed investment rose 20.2 percent, sliding from 20.5% in January to October. Private investment growth picked up by 0.2% in first 10 months.

China’s stocks retreated 0.7% on Tuesday. Stronger data only makes monetary tightening more likely by the People's Bank of China. Investors are also looking all around the world to the Federal Reserve, which is expected to raise interest rates at the end of its 2 days’ meeting the next day.

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