Alibaba Invests $ 200 million in $ 60 million in Snapchat

According to Techcrunch, Alibaba, the largest Chinese ecommerce service, is going to invest in the Snapchat messenger $ 200 million. At the same time, the fact that Snapchat is banned in China is noteworthy, since it stores user data in another country.

Now the service is estimated at $ 15 billion. But if Snapchat gets about $ 500 million in the next round, the company's valuation can rise to $ 16- $ 19 billion.

But Alibaba plans to invest $ 200 million outside the round. In the case of a successful transaction, the total amount of investments made by a Chinese company over the last year will be $ 6.3 billion for 26 transactions.
')
Negotiations of the companies began last year. Alibaba, according to rumors, did not plan to make investments in front of its IPO. And in December 2014, Imran Khan, who previously played an important role in the IPO of a Chinese company, took the post of director of strategies at Snapchat. This was the decisive reason for the positive outcome of the negotiations, as noted by Forbes.

Alibaba's capitalization is more than $ 200 billion, so it can actively invest fairly large sums. It is in the company's interest to invest in projects that can help develop e-commerce and expand Alibaba’s presence in foreign markets. Among the largest investments are $ 215 million investment in the Tango chat application, as well as $ 250 million investment in the Lyft ridesharing project.

For the previous 6 rounds of funding, Snapchat has raised about $ 650 million. It is also known
that the company rejected Facebook’s offer to purchase for $ 3 billion. Major investors also include Yahoo and the Chinese company Tencent, which competes with Alibaba.