E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding announced on Wednesday that it will set up Alibaba Sports Group, aiming to take a bigger share in the lucrative sports industry of China.
The launch of the Sports Group serves as one of the latest moves from Alibaba in China's sports industry after the e-commerce titan invested 1.2 billion yuan ($192 million) for a 50 percent stake of Guangzhou Evergrande, China's most successful soccer club and former Asian Champions League winner.
Alibaba also had cooperation with German champions Bayern Munich, Spanish giants Real Madrid and US National Basketball Association star Kobe Bryant.
Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma Yun once said providing health and happiness will be Alibaba's two main priorities in its next decade's development. And sports, Alibaba believes, can achieve both.
With the latest campaign, Alibaba said it hopes to bring "digital and economic" thinking to China's already booming sports industry, reshape the whole of the industry and make consumers enjoy much more comfortable and convenient sports services.
On back of 10 years' development and especially the successful hosting of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, China's sports industry has taken on shape and grown on a fast track.
Promoting fitness has also become one of the country's national strategies, with the Chinese government announcing plans last year to develop the country's sports industry and raise the sector's annual output to 5 trillion yuan by 2025.
With Beijing winning the hosting right of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in July, the local sports industry is expected to become an even bigger cake.
Alibaba said it will be engaged in all aspects of the sports industry, including sports events operations, business marketing and ticketing.
Separately, Alibaba's head of investor relations, Jane Penner, was quoted by Reuters as saying at a tech conference in New York on Tuesday that the company expected its total value of transactions to be lower in the second quarter than previously thought, as China's economic slowdown is taking a bite out of consumer spending.
"We are still seeing actually high engagement by buyers on our platforms ... but lower average order values, for example," Penner told Citi's Global Tech Conference, according to an online playback of the comments.
