Qilai Shen/Bloomberg NewsJack Ma, chief executive of the Alibaba Group, at the 2011 AliFest in Hangzhou, China, in September.

Jack Ma, chief executive of the Chinese e-commerce company the Alibaba Group, said on Friday that he was strongly considering buying Yahoo. It was the first public overture for the struggling Web portal.

“We are very interested,” Mr. Ma said when asked if his company wanted to make such an acquisition.

The comment from the stage at the China 2.0 conference at Stanford University confirmed what had already been reported: that Alibaba was among Yahoo’s suitors. Silver Lake Partners, Providence Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Microsoft have also reached out to Yahoo’s board.

Yahoo’s board is reviewing its strategic options after firing Carol A. Bartz, the company’s chief executive, who failed to turn around the company during a rocky two-and-a-half-year tenure. Selling all or part of the company is among the options the board is considering.

Yahoo declined to comment about Mr. Ma’s interest in an acquisition.

Mr. Ma’s history with Yahoo goes back several years, when Yahoo acquired a 40 percent stake in Alibaba. The relationship between the two companies soured, however, over human rights issues and a recent dispute over the online payment service Alipay.

Mr. Ma transferred ownership of Alipay into a separate company that he controlled. Yahoo said it had been unaware of the transfer until it was already complete and implied that Alibaba had not been adequately compensated.

The two sides later settled the dispute.

But the bad blood remains, and Mr. Ma has said repeatedly that he wants to buy back Yahoo’s 40 percent stake in his company. By buying Yahoo, he would get that stake back.

Mr. Ma indicated on stage that he had also talked with partners to join him in a Yahoo acquisition bid, without offering more details.

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