Alibaba Chief Executive Jack Ma said Thursday the e-commerce group would start talks with private equity firms about possibly buying Yahoo in the coming weeks, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“So many PEs are talking to us, and we will start to talk to them in the next weeks,” Mr. Ma was quoted as saying at Asia D, a conference hosted by All Things Digital, an online publishing partner of The Wall Street Journal.

The report also said that Jack Ma has interest in partnering with U.S. companies, but did not disclose details.

Jack Ma also said on October 17 that Alibaba had already prepared more than 20 billion U.S. dollars of funds to buy Yahoo. He expressed interest in buying Yahoo for the first time in early October, when he said he was “very very interested” in that when speaking at Stanford University.

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang said Wednesday that the company hasn’t ruled out a possible sale to Alibaba’s Mr. Ma or a private equity firms.

Potential buyers of Yahoo include Sliver Lake, Alibaba Group, DST, Microsoft, News Corp and others, according to numerous media reports.

Source:caijing