Report: Activist Investor Ryan Cohen Takes Stake in Alibaba

Investor Ryan Cohen has reportedly built a stake in Alibaba worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

He has also pushed the Chinese eCommerce firm to expand its stock buyback program, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Monday (Jan. 16).

Cohen is an activist investor, the co-founder of Chewy and the person who sent video game retailer GameStop’s shares soaring in March 2022 when he tweeted that he had purchased 100,000 shares of the company’s stock.

The investor contacted Alibaba in August 2022, telling the firm’s board he believed it can grow its sales by a double-digit percentage and its free cash flow by nearly 20% in five years, according to the WSJ report.

In the six months since then, Cohen has increased his stake in the company, the board expanded and extended Alibaba’s share-repurchase program and, since October, the company’s shares have risen about 67%, the report said.

Still, at about $117 on Friday (Jan. 13), Alibaba’s shares are down from their late 2020 high of over $300.

Since reaching that high in the wave that drove up many tech stocks in the first months of the pandemic, Alibaba’s stock has been hurt by lower consumer sentiment in China, COVID measures, supply chain disruptions and the country’s crackdown on tech companies, according to the report.

Alibaba had slowed its global expansion plans in July as it struggled to meet its goals. The company had launched its site in the United States three years earlier, with a goal of adding 1 million local businesses, but has fallen short of those targets in the years that followed.

The firm was also among the 10 top tech stocks that lost a combined $4.6 trillion in market cap in 2022. Alibaba was ranked ninth on this list, with its market valuation ending the year $82 billion lower than it started it.

Cohen has said that he admires Alibaba’s ability to grow earnings while also adding quality assets, that he wants to have a long-term relationship with the company and that he believes the company can support the price of its stock by repurchasing shares, just as Apple has done since 2012, the report said.