Snapchat said to have had talks with Alibaba on potential investment

Snapchat has held talks to sell a stake to the Alibaba Group, the Chinese Internet giant, people briefed on the matter said on Wednesday.

知情人士在周三说，Snapchat和中国互联网巨头阿里巴巴集团就股权出让进行了谈判。

Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s founder and chief executive, and Jim Wilkinson, a spokesman for Alibaba, declined to comment on the talks, which were first reported by Bloomberg News. The report put the potential valuation of the financing round at $10 billion.

该公司创始人、首席执行官埃文·斯皮格尔和阿里巴巴发言人吉姆·威尔金森均拒绝就谈判置评。首先报道该消息的是彭博新闻社，称这一轮融资的可能估值为100亿美元。

If a deal was reached, it would represent a big bet on the future of Snapchat, the pioneer of disappearing messaging applications. Self-destructing photos and messages have swept across Silicon Valley, catching the attention of tech stalwarts like Facebook, Google and Yahoo.

一旦交易达成，将是对Snapchat这个自动消失型聊天应用先行者的未来投下一笔重注。“阅后即焚”的照片和聊天讯息席卷硅谷，引起了Facebook、Google和雅虎等科技业中坚力量的注意。

Thus far, Snapchat seems to be the leader in the space. The company does not share its user numbers, but the application has been among the top 25 most downloaded apps in the Apple App Store in the United States for the past year, according to App Annie, a mobile analytics company.

目前来看，Snapchat在这个领域应该是领先的。公司没有透露用户数据，但移动分析公司App Annie的数据显示，Snapchat的应用下载量去年在美国的苹果应用商店排进了前25位。

What the company doesn’t have yet are robust revenues. It has focused instead on attracting more users to its service.

而公司目前缺的是强劲的营收。它一直把注意力放在吸引更多的用户上。

That may be fine for Alibaba, which has increasingly stepped up its venture capital investments as it prepares for one of the most anticipated initial public offerings in recent memory. The Chinese Internet giant is expected to make its market debut — which could value the company at more than $200 billion — in September, people briefed on those plans have said.

这对阿里巴巴来说可能不成问题，为了准备近年来最受瞩目的首次公开募股，该公司正在加大风险投资的力度。这家中国互联网巨头的估值可能超过了2000亿美元，据了解计划的人说，公司有望在九月在市场上亮相。

Even before the stock sale, Alibaba has taken stakes in a number of start-ups, as it seeks to make inroads into mobile apps, an area where it has been been trying to catch up. Over the past year or so, Alibaba has taken stakes in Sina Corporation’s Weibo, a popular Chinese equivalent to Twitter, as well as the messaging app Tango.

即便在上市之前，有意进入移动应用市场的阿里巴巴就已经开始入股一些创业公司了，这是它一直想要追赶的一个领域。过去几年里，阿里巴巴已经入股新浪集团的微博——一个受欢迎的中国版Twitter，此外还有聊天应用Tango。