Alibaba expands into financial news with China media investment

Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. is paying 1.2 billion yuan (USD193.5 million) for a stake in one of China’s most influential business media companies, as the e-commerce company expands into financial-information services.
China Business News, a television and newspaper company that’s part of the state-owned Shanghai Media Group Inc., and Alibaba will create a financial data and information service for Chinese businesses, the e-commerce company said, without disclosing details of its stake.
The two intend to use Alibaba’s trove of customer data and cloud computing technology to create a service that can help enterprises make investment decisions, Alibaba said in a statement yesterday. The envisioned information service, targeted at small and mid-sized enterprises, marks Alibaba’s entry into the business of providing news and information for investment.
The venture will also let mobile users of Alibaba auction site Taobao access the China Business News’s wealth-management information service.
Alibaba has increasingly tapped data collected from its network of hundreds of millions of buyers and sellers to establish and offer banking and credit services. Affiliate Ant Financial Services Group is already marketing financial products.
Ant Financial’s Yu’E Bao, the world’s fourth-biggest money fund, saw its assets under management swell to 711.7 billion yuan ($115 billion) as of March 31. That was up 132.8 billion yuan from the end of last year, according to the fund’s management firm.
Alibaba and Shanghai Media Group in November said they wanted to explore ways to work together, in areas from technology and research to marketing.
The investment in China Business News is the latest of a slew of deals Alibaba has engineered over the past year. The ecommerce company has announced 17 deals worth $2.2 billion in the past 12 months, including investments into logistics and taxi hailing apps.
That figure doesn’t include deals by funds backed by Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma, such as Yunfeng Financial Holdings Ltd. Shai Oster, Bloomberg