Yahoo!: Alibaba Stake Now Worth $36B, Says RBC

RBC Capital Markets‘s Mark Mahaney this afternoon reiterated an Outperform rating on shares of Yahoo!, and raised his price target to $44 from $38, writing that the value of the company’s stake in Alibaba Group Holding, the privately-owned e-commerce giant of China, has risen to $36 billion from what he had previously modeled as $26.4 billion.

Yahoo! analysts have been raising expecatations for what Alibaba may ultimately be worth in an IPO, though the timing of an offering is uncertain.

Mahaney was in China last week talking with investors and companies, and was impressed with Alibaba’s $5.7 billion in “total merchandise sales” on 11/11, the China version of Black Friday shopping. That amount was more than twice the value of total U.S. Online sales on Cyber Monday, he notes.

Herefore raises his valuation on Alibaba to $150 billion from $110 billion, and multiplies that by Yahoo!’s 24% stake in the firm:

Mahaney’s sum-of-the-parts model for Yahoo!, in which he thinks all of Yahoo!, including its stake in Yahoo! Japan, should be worth about $45 billion: