This story begins when Boss Ma was preparing to enter the C2C field.
As early as the end of 2002, Mr. Ma, who had achieved great success in the B2B field, decided to lead Alibaba, whose main business at the time was still B2B, into C2C.
But at that time, China's earliest C2C company, EachNet, had been in the market for more than four years and had just received a $30 million investment from eBay.
Faced with such opponents and unknown market prospects, Boss Ma's attempt in this new field is very risky and requires a large amount of capital investment. Otherwise, if he is not careful, he will drag down Alibaba's B2B business, which has just gained a foothold.
In order to avoid risks at that time, Alibaba received a $20 million investment from DS Capital. It was discovered that Barron, the Duke from England, was a very good "money sponsor" with plenty of money and little trouble. Therefore, Alibaba and DS Capital jointly invested in the creation of Taobao. DS Capital invested $5 million alone and held 25% of Taobao's shares, with the remaining shares held by Alibaba.
In May last year, Taobao went online.
In October, Alipay was launched.
In order to attract buyers and sellers, Boss Ma promised Taobao "three years free".
In a situation where cash was only going out but not coming in, if Taobao did not have continued backup resource support, its initial funding would not have been able to survive against the wealthy Eachnet.
Although Alibaba has obtained financing before, the development of its B2B business still requires investment. At this time, this part of the business is the core of Alibaba.
Although Taobao quickly made progress in market share, this success was based on the premise that Taobao was free while eBay-supported EachNet charged a fee, and Alibaba was under constant financial pressure.
Without money, Taobao will find it difficult to survive, whether it is the ant army-style advertising or the waiver of transaction fees.
Therefore, in the last round of financing, in addition to the US$100 million invested by Rich23 Capital in Alibaba, it also took out an additional US$50 million to invest separately in Taobao and Alipay, which was then a sub-business of Taobao.
Currently, Rich23 Capital holds approximately 33.3% of Taobao's shares, and DS Holdings holds approximately 16.7% of Taobao's shares. The two together hold exactly 50% of Taobao's shares, and the remaining shares belong to Alibaba.
Similarly, the premise for Mr. Ma to accept Barron's investment and allow him to hold such a large proportion of shares is that he gave the voting rights corresponding to Taobao shares to Mr. Ma just like in Alibaba. It was just a financial investment and he did not participate in the company's management decision-making.
This is also the reason why after Liu Chiping took office as the vice president of Rich23 Capital, he first went to Hangzhou, which is not far from Shanghai, to visit Mr. Ma.
After all, in the future, Liu Chiping will be mainly responsible for maintaining the daily relationship with Alibaba and Taobao, the companies they invested in.
After visiting Boss Ma, Liu Chiping's next stop will be the Shenzhen Stock Exchange to meet with Pony from Penguin Group.
After this meeting, he will go to Hong Kong to set up Rich Capital's Asia-Pacific headquarters.
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Barron's private jet has left Shanghai and flown back to London.
There, the Gulfstream G450 will pick up Bonnie and the Butts and other members of the Butt family and take them to the Caribbean first - the wedding of Viscount Butt's sister Jenny Butt and John Smith of the Sinclair family will be held on a small island in the Caribbean.
These people will set off first, and then the Gulfstream G450 will return to Shanghai to pick up Barron.
The reason for this arrangement is that Barron has a guest to meet in Shanghai during this time.
The other party is Badr Mohammed El Salad, president of the Kuwait Investment Authority.
Daisy, who stayed in Riyadh to negotiate investments with those tycoons in the Middle East, reported that the Athena Fund had obtained more than $700 million in investments from those tycoons, bringing the total size of the Athena Fund to more than $2 billion.
Many wealthy people are also interested in the Mars Fund, but this fund has not yet opened its investment window. It will take more than two months in September to start accepting investments again. From now on, the Mars Fund will only be open for purchase and redemption once a year in September.
This time, Bader did not fly all the way from Kuwait to Shanghai to meet Baron. During the initial chat, Baron learned that the Prime Minister of Kuwait would visit China at the beginning of next month.
Therefore, as Kuwait's sovereign fund, the Kuwait Investment Authority will conduct advance negotiations and preparations with China on some economic cooperation and investment.
This includes the application by both parties to register a joint venture investment company in China - Kuwait Huaxia Investment Company.
After approval by the board of directors, the Kuwait Investment Authority agreed to participate in the new industrial investment fund that Barron is about to establish.
The purpose of this meeting between the two parties is to further determine some key contents of this fund.
In addition to the Kuwait Investment Authority, the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which received the news, also expressed great interest in this fund and hopes to participate in it.
When Barron first proposed the plan for this industrial fund, his purpose was to use the money from the wealthy people in the Middle East to invest in industries, thereby making up for the regret that his current amount of funds is not enough to invest in all the industries in his future plans, so that he can gain a certain influence in many important industries.
Therefore, he would not object to the addition of more funds.
Anyway, this fund will eventually be controlled by him. Other investors, including the sovereign funds of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, can share the capital profits with them. As for the control of these industries, it still belongs to Barron himself.
In addition, this industrial investment fund has another very important function, which is to use part of its funds to invest in Colo, including some of its industries and infrastructure, thereby accelerating local development.
Anyway, as long as the final return of this fund is sufficient to satisfy the investors, they will not have any major opinions on where to invest specifically.
At the end of the day, making money for them is the most important thing.
Finally, before Baron left Shanghai, the Saudi joint investment fund that arrived in Shanghai later, with the participation of Baron's investment team, finally decided to establish a new investment fund named Global Industrial Investment Fund.
The Global Industrial Investment Fund (GII Fund) has an initial fund size of US$6 billion, of which DS Capital provided US$1.8 billion with its own funds, while the Kuwait Investment Authority and the Saudi Public Investment Fund each invested US$2.1 billion to complete the fund raising.
These funds will be transferred to a special account at Standard Chartered Bank, the custodian bank of the funds, within one month.
The initial lock-up period for the investments of the Kuwait Investment Authority and the Saudi Public Investment Fund is 5 years, which means that they can only recover their investments after 5 years at the earliest. Otherwise, a certain percentage of fees will be deducted for early recovery.
This is also because Barron's provides principal protection for the first investment lock-up period of the GII fund's investors, which gives the two sovereign funds the confidence to choose a five-year lock-up period.
Well, five years from now it will be 2009, and it will not affect bottom fishing during the subprime mortgage crisis.
As for the fund fees and the management's profit share, it is basically like what I said before, no management fee for an average annual return below 15%, and the higher the rate of return, the higher the share...