Alibaba’s investors may feel excited about its plan to list on a mainland Chinese stock exchange. In reality, there may not be much to celebrate.
Alibaba’s savvy leader Jack Ma has clearly sniffed the political winds in Beijing: Chinese officials have been openly pressing the country’s largest technology firms to return to their home markets. The problem until now has been that firms such as Alibaba and Tencent have been structured as offshore entities. Under Chinese rules, that means they can’t list domestically.
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