A Look At 12 Of Alibaba's Largest Investors

Many investors find tracking a stock’s institutional ownership effective as a strategy.

Investment firms usually count with resources and research that individual investors don’t. Thus, their stock picks are not random.

A look at Alibaba Group Holding Ltd BABA’s institutional shareholders might provide a better idea of the stock’s worth as the company prepares to report its fourth quarter earnings.

The Well Known

On mid-February, thee major shareholders disclosed how much Alibaba stock they owned. The largest stockholder, Softbank Corp, declared ownership of 797,742,990 Ordinary shares, which represented about 32.1 percent of the total shares outstanding.

For its part, Yahoo! Inc. YHOO said it owns 15.4 percent of Alibaba’s Ordinary stock, or 383,565,416 shares.

Finally, Mr. Jack Ma admitted holding 377,382,163 shares, representing 15.15 percent of the total Ordinary shares outstanding.

Other Investment Firms

By the end of 2014, Silver Lake Group, L.L.C. was the largest known institutional shareholder, with 54,679,509 shares, worth more than $5.6 billion at the time. The firm was trailed by T. Rowe Price Associates, which said it owned 22,348,104 shares by December 31, 2014.

Other major firms with billionaire stakes in the Chinese Internet company are FMR LLC (19,166,094 shares) and Sands Capital Management (19,566,814 shares).

Hedge Funds

Finally, let’s take a look at some of the hedgies invested in Alibaba. The largest known hedge fund shareholder at the company -as of the end of 2014- was Dan Loeb of Third Point LLC, who boosted his exposure by 38 percent, to 10,000,000 shares,over the last quarter of the year.

On the opposite, Rob Citrone’s Discovery Capital Management trimmed his wage by 10 percent over the quarter, to 9,252,511 shares.

Other prominent hedge fund investors are George Soros, Andreas Halvorsen and John Paulson.