We have always believed that Alipay and Alibaba are the same company, and SoftBank is the major shareholder of Alibaba, so we mistakenly believe that SoftBank is also the major shareholder of Alipay. In fact, Alipay is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ant Financial "Zhejiang Ant Small and Micro Financial Services Group Co., Ltd." Ant Financial is a Chinese domestic company independent of Alibaba Group and has no equity relationship with Alibaba Group. Alibaba's largest shareholder is SoftBank, Ant Financial's major shareholder is Hangzhou Junhan Equity Investment Partnership, and SoftBank is not on the list of Ant Financial's shareholders.

Alipay belonged to Alibaba Group in the early stage. It was a function involved in solving the transaction security of Taobao, but with the development of personal online payment, it has gradually expanded to its current scale.

Since 2019, in order to meet the principle of Chinese people's payment by Chinese people in Bank of China, Alipay has been gradually separated from Alibaba Group. In 2014, it was renamed Ant Financial and became what we see now.

Although Alipay and Alibaba have no structural relationship, Alipay was established based on the Taobao business of Alibaba Group, and it was mainly used to serve Taobao in the early stage. At the beginning of Alipay's independence, Alibaba and Alipay signed an agreement that Alipay would pay Alibaba 49.9% of its pre-tax profits as intellectual property licensing fees and technical service fees each year. Therefore, Alipay and Alibaba are the same company in terms of both business and economic relations.

Ant Financial is currently the world's largest unicorn company, with a valuation of more than $160 billion as of 2018. Alipay's business has penetrated into every aspect of personal life. At the same time, Alipay is also actively developing international business. If Ant Financial goes public in the future, it will definitely exceed Alibaba's market value.

First, let's say it's not. Alibaba's largest shareholder is SoftBank, and Alipay is strictly speaking not related to SoftBank now.

The split of Alipay

Alipay was originally owned by Alibaba, but in mid-June 2011, Alibaba Group transferred Alipay's equity to Zhejiang Alibaba in two batches. This company is held by Jack Ma and Xie Shihuang, one of Alibaba's 18 founders, with 80% and 20% shares respectively, and the transfer price is 330 million yuan.

This incident also made Jack Ma called a "rogue" (Wang Xing of Meituan always mentions this when criticizing Jack Ma), because from a procedural point of view, Alipay is such a high-quality asset that any shareholder with a little bit of brains would not agree to split it.

After this incident, Jack Ma's response to the Alipay equity transfer was indeed imperfect, but correct; on July 29, 2011, Alibaba Group, Yahoo and Softbank officially signed a supplementary agreement on the Alipay equity transfer event. Alipay's holding company promised to give Alibaba Group a one-time cash return when it goes public, with the return amount being 37.5% of Alipay's total market value at the time of listing (based on the IPO price), and the return amount will not be less than US$2 billion and not more than US$6 billion.

Why split Alibaba?

Why did Jack Ma split Alibaba at that time? The most critical factor is that in order to obtain a third-party payment license, if Alipay is not separated independently, the country will never open the door and issue a payment license to a foreign-controlled enterprise. After all, from a security perspective, foreign capital controlling my country's payment system itself has a great negative impact on my country's finance.

Jack Ma later said in the face of this problem: As early as 2008, the board of directors had discussed the equity issue of Alipay. If the entry threshold involves the domestic and foreign attributes of the company, what should the company do? Because everyone knows Alibaba's equity structure, major shareholders Softbank and Yahoo are both foreign capital. However, the problem has not been solved. By 2011, although Alipay was in a leading position, if it could not obtain a license on time, it would have no place to turn around under the containment of competitors. So Jack Ma would let go and force Alipay to become domestic capital (the shareholders said that there was no agreement, and Jack Ma insisted that there was. In fact, there should be no agreement, otherwise there would not be a supplementary agreement later, and Jack Ma would not be called a gangster because of this incident. You can go online to check the specific events before and after).

Shareholders of Alipay

Through Qichacha, we can find out that the only shareholder of Alipay is Zhejiang Ant Small and Micro Financial Services Group Co., Ltd.

The major shareholders of Zhejiang Ant Small and Micro Financial Services Group Co., Ltd. are Hangzhou Junhan Equity Investment Partnership (Limited Partnership) and Hangzhou Junao Equity Investment Partnership (Limited Partnership). Both of them are companies controlled by Jack Ma and his team. Therefore, Alipay and Softbank have no direct relationship now. The relationship between the two is that if Alipay goes public, it will have to compensate Softbank shareholders with a sum of money.

——This answer is compiled by Xi'an Dingang Digital Currency Intelligent Quantitative Fully Automatic Coin Trading Robot (historical income, data verification, live broadcast).

Softbank indirectly holds about 8% of Ant Financial's shares, which is equivalent to about 8% of Alipay's shares, close to the single largest.

It's the fucking American devils. The Japanese devils no longer dare to hold too much. Under pressure from the American devils, Jack Ma, this bastard, pushed the interests of the Chinese people into the hands of the American devils. It is predicted that this man will not have a good end.

Alibaba is Japanese, and Softbank gave Jack Ma a blood transfusion. There is Japanese capital behind the scenes