I didn't find a lot of substance in this article, the message was basically "Alibaba's accounting practice is opaque, so we don't know where the money is." the reminder that in Arabian nights Alibaba was a thief seems to tie up the narrative nicely. Not that I'm buying it.<p>That said, it is tremendously important to Yahoo! that they understand the real value of Alibaba. No doubt it would be tremendously useful to have transparency on where all the money is coming from and where it is going, presumably these people use a recognized accounting firm to provide audited results for people who want to know?
What is more likely: that Alibaba is making up its numbers, or that Yahoo has actually made one good investment in the last six years?<p>Ponder that thought for a bit. I don't know if you actually need to open up an accounting book to know something's fishy :)
>“What the company is really earning we don’t know,” says Chanos. “My experience with Chinese companies is that what you don’t know is generally not good news"<p>Makes sense to me, if it was good news why wouldn't they tell you?
Malls in China are starting to hollow-out because people are buying almost everything online. Increasingly, you go to malls for the expensive stuff that can be easily faked as well as for restaurants. So if Alibaba isn't recording a lot of profit, that's because it's engineering ways to put money in useful places, not because it doesn't have customers.
> John Chanos, president of Kynikos Associates,<p>Spotted the professional cynic.<p>(Brilliant, making money out of it. The forerunner was famously dirt, live-in-a-barrel, poor. But with the balls to ask Alexander to "stand a little out of my sun.")