Alibaba.com is quietly moving out of the Hong Kong stock exchange today as a private company, less than five years after its frenzied, high-profile initial public offering.
The company, the world's largest business-to-business e-commerce services provider, will withdraw the listing of its shares from the exchange at 4pm after recently completing its privatisation.
Senior executives would not make any formal comments about today's transition, which a spokeswoman described as 'a mechanical finish based on the calendar we established when we rolled out this privatisation plan' in February.
But Jack Ma Yun, the chairman and chief executive of parent company Alibaba Group, offered a more philosophical spin on the situation earlier this year. 'Just as the IPO was a starting point for Alibaba.com and not the finish line, [the] privatisation is not the end but rather a new beginning,' Ma had said in an internal e-mail sent in February to the group's 25,000-odd staff worldwide.
Alibaba.com aims to advance sweeping reforms of its operations after going private to improve the way it serves customers.
'This business upgrade will involve broad, complex and large-scale mechanisms, and will undoubtedly have a significant impact on Alibaba.com's profitability over the next few years,' Ma said.
Alibaba.com spokeswoman Julie Huang Tsang said undertaking that long process was 'one of the reasons we wanted to privatise'.