Yahoo might be bought by its own investment

ANOTHER POTENTIAL BIDDER for the web portal outfit Yahoo is one of its own Asian investments.

One of the reasons Yahoo is hard to snap up is because it has a 40 per cent investment stake in a Chinese company called Alibaba. This makes Yahoo worth over $10 billion more than it would be worth otherwise.

So far plans to buy Yahoo have involved the company first selling this stake to make it smaller.

Now it seems that Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba Group, has been approached by a group of private equity investors to gauge his interest in joining a bid to buy Yahoo.

According to Reuters, Ma has not indicated whether or not he is going to bite.

Yahoo, which has a market capitalisation of about $22 billion, does not appear to have been approached by anyone offering to buy it yet.

However a Hong Kong-based analyst at Nomura said it is inevitable that Alibaba will get involved in any buyout. µ