Goldman Sachs has joined Alibaba Group’s $8 billion loan team with $500million in financing as the Chinese e-commerce giant’s initial public offering is expected to come as early as the fourth quarter of this year, Reuters reported. 

Goldman has joined as mandated lead arranger and bookrunner on the loan, which has a June 7 deadline, Thomson Reuters publication Basis Point said Monday, citing an anonymous source.

The $500million loan came two weeks after the bank doubled valuation for Alibaba to $70billion, roughly $2billion lower than the market value of Tencent, China’s leading Internet company.

Meanwhile, if a highly-anticipated stock market listing comes to pass, Alibaba could become China’s biggest payer of fees to global investment banks in a decade, said John Foley, a Reuters Breakingviews columnist.

If Alibaba could sell $15 billion of stock, a bit less than Facebook did in 2012, apply a 1.75 percent commission and the spoils could be $260 million, Foley said.

Alibaba has yet to select an underwriting team, but a financial industry source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters that the company is likely to favor banks that have extended it loans.
 
Alibaba signed with nine banks for an $8billion loan on April 30, a week before Jack Ma resigned as the group's CEO. The deal was another massive financing the group has made since last year’s $4billion loan.

The nine banks providing the loan include Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., Credit Suisse Group AG, Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG, DBS Group Holdings Ltd., HSBC Holdings PLC, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley and Mizuho Corporate Bank Ltd..

The loan will refinance Alibaba’s existing debt and give the company an extra pile of cash ahead of its IPO, Basis Point said.

Alibaba’s recent moves including strategic partnerships with Sina Weibo as well as Autoavi, China’s largest navigation map provider, sparked speculations that the group is planning an early IPO, despite an agreement with Yahoo saying that it can’t buy back this second tranche of Yahoo’s 10% ownership in Alibaba from Yahoo unless it holds an IPO by December 2015.

Yahoo financial report showed Alibaba revenue at $1.84billion in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2012, a robust 80% growth compared with the same period in the previous year, compared with the 74% year-on-year growth in the third quarter.