Headed by Jack Ma, China's premier e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has been on a pretty aggressive investment and acquisition spree as of late, and it seems like the company is just getting started. In an announcement on Thursday, the Chinese firm announced that it has signed a massive $3 billion, five-year loan.
While details concerning the $3 billion deal are scarce, sources, who have opted to remain anonymous, have alleged that prominent financial institutions ANZ, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Mizuho Bank and Morgan Stanley served as the lead arrangers and bookrunners for the Chinese firm's loan.
The additional funding would enable the company to ramp up its already aggressive pace even further. Currently, the company is in an ongoing acquisition deal with Youku Tudou, China's primary video portal, in an alleged $3.5 billion deal.
Apart from this, Alibaba has also invested in companies such as Groupon, PayTM, Snapdeal and even popular social media platform Snapchat.
In fact, Alibaba has posted that during the final quarter of 2015 alone, the company's capital expenditures surged up to $752 million, more than three times its expenditures during the previous year.
While the $3 billion loan is already quite notable, Alibaba stated that there is still a chance that the amount could be increased, just in case the firm would need more funding.
"The loan, which is subject to upsize through oversubscriptions in syndication, has a five-year bullet maturity and is priced at 110 basis points over LIBOR," the company said in a statement.
So where does Alibaba plan to use its newest $3 billion loan? The company was pretty brief about the deal, simply stating that the loan would be used for "general corporate purposes." Of course, such a statement could mean a number of pertinent business decisions.
Some analysts are alleging that Alibaba might be setting its sights on the Indian market, which Ma has been very open about. The Alibaba chief has been quite optimistic about India's potential, proving it by investing largely in Indian firms such as PayTM. Recently, Alibaba has begun bridging the Chinese-Indian demographic, enabling Chinese sellers to offer their products to the vast Indian market.
