(Yicai Global) April 3 -- Investment manager Altaba, formerly known as Yahoo, is preparing for liquidation, and its holdings of Chinese tech behemoth Alibaba Group Holding's stocks are first in line to get offloaded. 

Altaba's board of directors has approved a dissolution plan and it intends to sell no more than 50 percent of its Alibaba stocks before the proposal is approved by shareholders in order to secure its liquid assets, the New York-headquartered firm said in a statement. 

The firm held nearly 11 percent of Alibaba's American Depositary Receipts and was the Hangzhou-based firm's second-largest shareholder at the end of 2018. ADRs are non-US companies' stocks listed in the States. 

The move represents the "most definitive step" that the fund could take to decrease the discount to net asset value at which its stocks trade, said Thomas J. McInerney, the chief executive of Altaba. A discount to NAV means that a fund's market trading price is lower than the value of its net assets. 

Altaba estimates that the sum of aggregate liquidating distributions to shareholders ranges between about USD39.8 billion and USD41.1 billion, or of USD76.6 to USD79.2 per share, which would be delivered in the fourth quarter.

Alibaba's share price [NYSE:BABA] advanced 0.5 percent to USD181.7 yesterday, with a market value of USD471.1 billion. Altaba's equity price [NASDAQ:AABA] rose 0.4 percent to USD73.9 per share.

Verizon acquired Yahoo's core internet business in 2017, and the remainder was renamed as Altaba.

Editor: Emmi Laine