Alibaba Tracker: The Partner Games

Partners! Partners everywhere!

Chinese online retail juggernaut Alibaba continues to partner, invest and grow across the globe, building a greater international footprint to balance out losses from a slowing domestic market.

For one, Alibaba is setting the stage to expand its hold on Southeast Asia. Last week, Alibaba and Southeast Asia acquisition Lazada, the leading eCommerce platform in Thailand, reportedly signed an agreement to provide eCommerce training to 30,000 Thai SMBs.

Alibaba also continued to build out its investments in the film industry, this time in the Emerald Isle. Alibaba, through its cinema ticketing system subsidiary Yueke, invested in Irish startup Showtime Analytics. The Irish startup’s analytics products and services allow film distributors and owners to collate, analyze and visualize operational data in real time.

Yueke and Showtime are planning to collaborate on developing products specific to the booming Chinese cinema industry. Some expect the Chinese movie market to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest by the end of this year. In 2013, just 8 percent of movie tickets in China were sold online. In 2014, the rate had jumped to 30 percent — and the numbers from 2015 estimate at least half of tickets were purchased online. Some even put the figures later in 2015 closer to 75 percent.

Elsewhere in Europe, Alibaba, through its online payments platform Alipay, has announced a series of partnerships with European financial institutions — including BNP Paribas, Barclays, UniCredit and SIX Payment Service, said the Paypers — to provide Alipay’s current 450 million active users with additional opportunities to use its services in Europe. These partnerships will enable an additional 930,000 merchants to join Alipay’s European network.

Beyond mainland China and excluding these new partnerships, Alipay has already accepted at least 80,000 merchants as of June 2016 (though the figure may be closer to 100,000 now) through more than 70 countries. Australia recently got AliPay as well via payments provider Quest Payment Systems.

But its moves haven’t all been international. Alibaba announced it teamed up with China’s largest phone carrier, China Mobile. The stated goal of the partnership is to develop and optimize users’ mobile internet access and mobile experiences.

Consumers in China are much more likely to use a smartphone to make a purchase compared to consumers in the U.S. and U.K. The latter likely have entrenched consumer behavior to thank for slower mobile growth, along with smaller-level transactions in the former boosting consumer confidence in mobile payments in Asia. But the partnership is not just about payments.

Though Alibaba and China Mobile are currently working on eCommerce and mobile payment technologies, they are also geared toward optimizing mobile access and online experience. As of now, China has at least 710 million internet users, and more than 90 percent of them use wireless devices to go online, according to government data.

Alibaba and China Mobile are also partnering to work on information infrastructure and cloud computing developments with Alibaba’s cloud computing arm, Alibaba Cloud, to bring the nation further into the smart device era. And if the partnership also happens to help Alibaba compete against Amazon and Microsoft on the cloud computing front, all the better for the Chinese retail giant.

This past summer, Alibaba announced it would be investing $1 billion in its cloud-computing business with the goal of launching an artificial intelligence  (AI) platform, DT PAI. The AI platform is meant to enable developers and companies that use Alibaba’s eCommerce sites to access user behavior data and eCommerce industry trends.

Alibaba is also facing heat on its home turf. Earlier this week, the Chinese Consumers’ Association (CCA) released a report alleging that many major eCommerce platforms — including Alibaba, JD.com and Amazon — had artificially hiked prices of their products before Nov. 11.

In doing so, retailers were able to advertise superficially steeper discounts on the day of the annual shopping festival, conning consumers into believing they were getting bargains.

While the CCA report alleges Amazon to be the worst offender, the group claims that almost 19 percent of surveyed discounted items on Alibaba’s Tmall were still above regular retail prices. The CCA is now calling on the Chinese government to intervene, investigate and potentially punish offending merchants and eCommerce platforms.