Alibaba stays busy with e-commerce partnerships

Hangzhou, China – Nobody can accuse Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. of sitting back and resting on its past success.



The global e-commerce giant is constantly making investments and launching new businesses, and in the past 24 hours has made two new business moves of significant interest to its online retailing competitors.



In one of those moves, Alibaba launched a series of three initiatives with Singapore Post Limited, Singapore’s national postal provider, designed to create an end-to-end e-commerce logistics platform. In the first initiative, Alibaba will invest up to approximately $68 million to obtain a 34% stake in SingPost subsidiary Quantium Solutions International (QSI), which provides e-commerce logistics and fulfilment services across the Asia Pacific region.



QSI will reorganize its business and become the joint venture vehicle of SingPost and Alibaba Group. This will allow QSI to ramp up its development of e-commerce logistics infrastructure and services. QSI will encompass e-commerce warehousing, last mile delivery and other end-to-end e-commerce solutions.



In the second initiative, Alibaba will purchase about 107.5 million new ordinary shares of SingPost for $138.6 million to increase its interest from 10.23% to 14.51%. Alibaba acquired its initial stake in SingPost in 2014.



SingPost and Alibaba have also entered into a joint strategic business development framework to further improve efficiency and integration of e-commerce logistics solutions. SingPost and Alibaba will share their respective knowledge and leverage each other’s strengths to scale across the e-commerce logistics value chain. A joint steering committee will be created and drawn from their respective executives.



And that’s not all. Separately, Alibaba has invested in Mei.com, a Chinese flash sales site for luxury goods. The investment will enable Alibaba to integrate resources from its Tmall.com, third-party e-commerce platform to form a specialized services team to support Mei.com’s development.



Alibaba plans to assist Mei.com in growing its user base, brand cooperation base, logistic services and IT infrastructure services. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.