Alibaba.com, a leading business-to-business website of the Chinese Internet giant Alibaba Group, was delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange Wednesday.

The withdrawal of the listing, signaling privatization of the group's only publicly traded subsidiary, took effect at 4 pm, according to a statement jointly issued by the group and the website Wednesday morning.

The privatization of Alibaba.com was sanctioned by the Grand Court of Cayman Islands, where the group is registered, on Friday (Cayman Islands time), as the vast majority of the website's minority shareholders voted in favor of the scheme in late May, said an earlier statement.

Alibaba offered to buy around 26 percent of stake it does not own in its subsidiary for 13.5 Hong Kong dollars (1.74 US dollars) a share, with the total cost estimated at 19 billion Hong Kong dollars.

Alibaba.com was established in 1999 by Jack Ma in Hangzhou, capital city of Zhejiang province, and went public in 2007.