Alibaba Considering Alipay Spin-Off

In a interview Tuesday with CCTV, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd BABA Chairman Jack Ma said that Alibaba's finance services arm Ant Financial Services, which controls Alipay, will go public, with a potential China listing for a valuable component of Alibaba.

While Alibaba was unable to list in China for the company's record-breaking IPO, Ma hopes to get the opportunity to list Ant Financial Services in China. Alipay processed nearly $800 billion in transactions for the year ended June 30, 2014. Currently, Alibaba controls 37.5 percent of Ant Financial, with the option to take a direct stake.

Any IPO of Ant Financial must raise at least $25 billion, which should not be difficult given the current valuation of Alibaba shares; At time of writing, Alibaba had a market cap of $285 billion. The move would be similar to the eBay Inc and PayPal spin-off.

Shares of Alibaba were trading lower in the pre-market session, down 1.5 percent at $117.38.

Alibaba's Singles Day event took in a record amount of sales. BBC News reported that "sales had reached 47.3 billion yuan," or $7.7 billion, and that it had shipped 224 million orders. Last year, the e-commerce giant recorded sales of $5.75 billion and shipped more than 150 million packages.

In a note released Monday, SunTrust's Robert Peck wrote, "if Alibaba reaches more than "$8.5B of GMV on Singles Day it would represent ~45 percent GMV growth, down only slightly from 49 percent last quarter. This would be remarkable given the difficult comparison to last year’s growth (~80 percent) on Singles Day.”