China’s Alibaba Group has opened a registered office in Russia, where its online retail operation AliExpress already attracts 15.6m customers each month, making it by far and away the country’s most popular e-commerce site. When the Chinese company placed 13% of its stock on the New York Stock Exchange last year, the IPO attracted a record $21.76bn. Alibaba now has a customer base of 350m people worldwide, a capitalisation of $ 222.9bn as of June 1, and counts Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov amongst its shareholders. Although the size of his stakeholding is not in the public domain, last November he told CNBC that the value of his shares had risen by 500%.
Source: Kommersant