More details from the Alibaba.com terms sheet: It seems that only Alibaba.com will be listed and the other properties belonging to the Alibaba Group, including www.taobao.com and Yahoo China properties, will remain separate. Alibaba.com will offer 17% of its total registered share capital for an estimated US$1 billion dollars, giving Alibaba.com a market cap of a little less than US$6 billion dollars.

Yahoo already owns 40% of Alibaba Group, which it bought two years ago for US$1 billion dollars, and plans now to buy an additional $100 million worth of Alibaba.com shares. Considering how well recent IPOs have done in the HK market, Yahoo will likely see even further gains.

Only 26.5% of the shares being offered are new, meaning the rest are being sold by current shareholders. This means that a majority of money raised from the IPO will not go into Alibaba.com's coffers.

But what has to be the most interesting fact of all is Alibaba.com's strong financials, which on the surface look even better than Baidu's:

“Goldman Sachs is forecasting a profit of $83.8 million this year, a sharp 186% spurt from 2006. That's actually better than Baidu, where Wall Street is looking for Baidu to grow its bottom line by 105%, to roughly $77 million this year.”