Back in 2010 and 2011, Alibaba Group founder and then-chief executive Jack Ma and vice chairman Joseph Tsai were under pressure. Executives at Yahoo!, which owned a 40 percent stake in the Chinese e-commerce giant, were under the gun from their own investors to cut corporate debt and extract value from their prized asset, and they wanted to sell down their stake. The problem: The Alibaba executives were struggling to findbuyers.
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