Zulily jumps on news of bigger Alibaba stake

US online retailer Zulily's shares jumped Monday on news that Alibaba, China's e-commerce giant, has raised its stake in the boutique that markets to mothers and features daily deals.

Zulily closed 5.2 percent higher at $13.98 on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Alibaba fell 0.4 percent to $86.72 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Alibaba, the operator of Taobao, China's most popular online retailer, increased its stake in Zulily to more than nine percent this month, according to the company's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission late Friday.

Alibaba said it had bought about 4.8 million Zulily Class A shares at a cost of around $56 million.

Zulily's target market is mothers, and the Seattle-based company offers an array of clothing, toys and other household items in daily deals that typically last 72 hours. Zulily launched in 2010 and went public in November 2013 at $22 a share. Within months, the price had soared to about $70, but then fell quickly back down again as growth slowed.

In February, the company reported that fiscal fourth-quarter net income for the three months ending December 28 fell 14.7 percent from a year ago to $10.9 million.

Alibaba's Taobao is estimated to hold more than 90 percent of the country's online market for consumer-to-consumer transactions.

It made its debut on Wall Street in September last year, raising $25.02 billion and breaking the record for the largest initial public offering in history.