Employees work in the Momo Inc office in Beijing.[Photo/VCG]

E-commerce giant's finance affiliates backing plan to take the dating application private

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has joined a group seeking to buy out Chinese dating app Momo Inc, which is expected to accelerate its privatization process.

The move is also Alibaba's latest efforts to boost its presence in social networking as the e-commerce giant is leveraging social networking sites to offer better advertising services for sellers, experts said.

Momo saw a record rally in its Nasdaq-listed shares on Wednesday after a regulatory filing showed Alibaba's finance affiliates are backing the plan to take the company private.

Its share price surged 33 percent to $16.09, the biggest jump since its December 2014 initial public offering.

Alibaba and Momo both declined to comment on the report.

Founded in 2011, Momo is a major player in Chinese social networking. The Beijing-based company had 69.8 million active users in December.

Last month, Joseph Tsai, co-founder of Alibaba, joined Momo's board as a director.

When Momo went public, Alibaba owned about 21 percent of the company's shares.

A group led by Tang Yan, Momo chairman and chief executive officer, proposed to buy out the company last year for $18.90 per share, valuing the company at more than $3 billion.

Analysts said Alibaba's decision to back the buyout plan will significantly speed up the privatization process of Momo.

"Alibaba will provide strong capital support to ensure that the deal can be completed as soon as possible," said Vinsan Wang, an analyst at Tiger Brokerage Group, which provides Internet brokerage business for US and Hong Kong stocks.

With Alibaba on board, the buyout group now controls 72.6 percent of Momo's shares and 91.6 percent of the voting power, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Alibaba is behind a string of Chinese companies' efforts to delist from US stock markets so that they can go public domestically at higher valuations.

On Wednesday, Alibaba announced it has completed the buyout of Youku Tudou Inc, a leading video streaming site in China.

Jane Zhang, an analyst at IT research firm Gartner Inc, said the move is part of Alibaba's broad efforts to use social networking to offer targeted advertising services for sellers on its shopping platform.

"Alibaba's ambitions in social networking is changing. It is no longer aiming to challenge the dominance of Tencent Holdings Ltd, which operates WeChat, the most popular instant messaging platform in China," Zhang said.

"Instead, it wants to leverage smaller social sites like Momo to target a particular segment of users, which, in fact, is a more efficient way to advertise sellers' products."

Compared with WeChat, which is targeting almost everyone in China, she said Momo chiefly focuses on young people in third- and fourth-tier cities.

"The smaller group of users a website is targeting, the more efficient the advertising can be. Because its users have similar interests, their demands are easier to be identified and met," Zhang added.