Displaying items by tag: alibaba

With the increasing usage of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs, mobile internet is becoming a new traffic entry point for many internet players. Alibaba's free wifi deployment will facilitate their entry point.

After setting up its strategy as “All in Mobile E-Commerce” at the beginning of this year, Alibaba has been gradually building up its Online2Offline business - now focusing on healthcare. 

The latest payment report released by PBOC shows that in 2014Q1, electronic payments kept a steady growth with the most eye-catching performance being from mobile payments.

The latest figures from online saving funds financial statements have shown that the BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) online money funds continued expanding. The 2014Q1 data reveals that Tianghong Zenglibao, relying on the huge client base of Yuebao, lead the market and is the first online saving funds that exceeds RMB100 Billion.

In recent years China's mobile internet has been developing quickly and had a great impact on people’s lives. The official figures show that by the end of 2013, China had approximately 500 million mobile internet users, a 25% increase over 2012. With the penetration of smartphones in China more users prefer to use mobile devices to deal with many daily tasks. 

You'd be forgiven for missing it, but in the buying spree that we've seen in the last couple of weeks from Alibaba, one of the most significant investments was for a controlling stake in Hundsun Technologies. The ~US$532M investment in the firm means that Alibaba now has control of nearly 95% of all domestic trading systems in China and continues to consolidate its position as a financial technology provider.

A couple of days ago, media announced that Alibaba had made a substantial investment in InTime, which is a Hong Kong company that manages mainland China upper-end retail malls. These malls are typically branded InTime, but are multi-brand inside where each brand has a small section and potentially dedicated staff to that section. 

This past weekend Alibaba and Baidu met with the People's Bank of China (PBOC) in a closed door session to discuss the ongoing challenges with Chinese online finance regulation. The fact that the regulators are consulting with the industry is a great sign that the regulations will (hopefully) be built on consultation and discussion, and as both Baidu and Alibaba have intentions of setting up their own private banks, it's likely in their best interest to sit down with the regulators as well.

Over the past week news headlines have been awash with how Chinese banks are pushing back against Alibaba's Yuebao and Laicitong as the online finance products have rapidly grown their AUM at the expense of bank deposits. The banks now are expanding their push though and are challenging money funds' market share in China.

In another foray from the Internet giant into high finance, Alibaba recently announced that one million virtual credit cards will be issued next week.