Generally speaking, mature entrepreneurial teams usually have creative designers and corresponding technicians, but they often lack funds (marketing channels, contacts, etc. ) Promote the development of entrepreneurship. The form of the early shortcomings of the investment and entrepreneurship team is called venture capital. The basic condition for investors is to continuously occupy a certain proportion of the shares of the investee (attention is the basic condition, and generally speaking, the requirements of venture capital are not limited to this). With the continuous expansion of the value of the entrepreneurial team, this constant proportion of shares will also increase in value, thus bringing investors several times (or even dozens of times) of income in the future-of course, correspondingly, if the entrepreneurial team fails to develop, the constant shares will shrink simultaneously, so this investment is high-yield and high-risk.
Back in Alibaba, Ma Yun conceived the model of Alibaba's e-commerce, and at the same time, through his repeated entrepreneurial manpower accumulation, he assembled a set of management and technical teams. However, he lacks the funds needed to expand the market. At this time, among the many venture capital institutions he contacted, Softbank of Japan took a fancy to Ali's model. Softbank, as a giant and large venture capital institution in Japan's communication field, also invested in Yahoo Japan. Therefore, in order to gain more profits, Softbank persuaded Yahoo USA to invest in Ali and obtained a fixed proportion of shares in Alibaba, which is the origin of foreign shares in Ali Group.
By the way, Alibaba is not a "foreign company" even if its foreign shares account for about 60%.
It should be noted that shares represent the proportion of shareholders' capital in the company, but not the distribution of power within the company-the latter is called "equity". For a traditional enterprise, shareholders' equity is often equal to the share quota, but this is not necessary. In fact, investment enterprises in the field of venture capital often adopt the structure of A-B shares, that is, equity and shares are not equal.
Specific to Ali's example, although Softbank and Yahoo hold 60% of the shares, their B shares have high dividend rights but few voting rights. In other words, although Softbank and Yahoo can get high dividends, they don't have much influence at the shareholders' meeting, while Ma Yun and other start-ups have few personal shares, but their A shares have several times the voting rights, which really determines the direction of the shareholders' meeting. In addition, in modern enterprise management, besides shareholders, there are also professional decision-making boards (the board of directors of Ali Group) and professional administrative teams (the managers of Ali Group) which are firmly controlled by the China team headed by Jack Ma, so the situation of Softbank and Yahoo is closer to buying a high-value wealth management product called "Alibaba", which is obviously a China company.
In fact, in the field of venture capital, it is a very common situation that investors' equity is far less than shares. After all, the purpose of investors is not to really spend manpower and energy to control an enterprise (in fact, investors usually can't manage enterprises in the Internet field well because they are not as familiar with business as entrepreneurial teams), but to pursue interests, so there is no need to intervene in enterprise management and ownership. For investors, it is only in their interest to measure "how many shares are held" and "when to sell", that's all.