Alibaba’s Ant Pay seeks $10bn in funding

Alibaba’s payments division, Ant Pay, is looking to raise some serious money in the next week or so. It apparently wants to bag $10 billion in the next few days and the likes of the Carlyle Group and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board are reportedly lined up as first-time investors,

One of the investors says of the prospects:

Ant Financial’s mobile payments network is unique and can’t be found anywhere else globally, it’s quite hard for rivals to replicate them in other countries. Ant is also evolving as a company and its revenue from tech service fees will likely grow much bigger, as it’s opening up its platform to other financial firms such as smaller banks.
– Ben Zhou, managing director at Warburg Pincus

It is is reported that Ant Financial posted a 65% increase in pre-tax profits in the year to March taking it to to 9.18 billion yuan ($1.4 billion). Ant Financial is already the largest online payments service in China and is also apparently the best funded payments service in the world. So the new money it seeks will further cements its dominant position. The Alibaba group, all told, is currently valued at 150 billion dollars.

We don’t necessarily write that much about Alibaba, and Ant Pay in particular, when we should. They are online and ecommerce giants. We are guilty of western bias and we’d love to know your experiences of your dealings with Alibaba.