Expedia is trading up today as unconfirmed rumors circulate about a possible bid by Alibaba, who last week raised over $22 billion in their IPO. Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) is a publicly traded China-based group of e-commerce businesses, including online web portals, online retail and payment services, a shopping search engine and data-centric cloud computing services.
Reuters reported on Monday, citing sources who have direct knowledge of the deal, that bankers of Alibaba have exercised a “green shoe” option by buying an additional 48 million shares from the company to cover stock they sold to meet high investor demand, which takes the value of the deal to $25 billion.
“Based on yesterday’s closing prices for the companies in the S&P 500, Alibaba would be one of the largest 15 companies in the S&P 500 by market capitalization,” FactSet’s John Butters said. “It would rank #12 in the index overall, ahead of companies in more “traditional” industries such as Pfizer ($193.9 billion), IBM ($193.3 billion), and Coca-Cola ($183.3 billion).
“Looking specifically at the Internet Retail sub-industry in the S&P 500, Alibaba would rank first out of six companies by highest market capitalization. It would be ahead of Amazon.com, Priceline.com, Netflix, TripAdvisor, and Expedia.”
On speculation, Expedia shares went from $83.99 to $85.67 in under 15 minutes.
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