Alibaba Eyes Payments Tie-Up With Apple
Jack Ma Says He’s Interested in Partnering With U.S. Tech Firm
By ROLFE WINKLER And YUN-HEE KIM Updated Oct. 2014 2:07 a 28,.m. ET
Two of the tech world’s hottest companies— Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Apple Inc. are interested in partnering with each other for a possible alliance in financial payments. Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant that last month raised $25 billion in the world’s biggest-ever initial public offering, has controlled 80% of China’s online shopping market, and Alipay, the
Alibaba’s payments service is the third biggest payments service in the world, with 300 million active users. For Apple, its new launched payment system called Apple Pay allows iPhone users to pay for products from their handsets. Thus, An alliance between Alibaba and Apple would benefit a lot to each other. For Apple, making a corporation with Alipay can let Apple take advantage of Alipay’s strong occupancy in Chinese financial market and institutions, which help
Apple catch up with the trend of Internet Finance. For Alibaba, working with Apple can let
Alibaba quickly enter U.S. market and collect information on payments made in physical stores, which does great benefit to the integration of data center called AliCloud, one of subsidiary in the Alibaba empire since Age of Big Data is coming.
So what is Alibaba?, it is a marketplace ,a mobile ,a shipping company, a search engine and a bank , all in one giant group. “Alibaba is China’s — and by some measures, the world’s — biggest online commerce company. Its three main sites — Taobao, Tmall and Alibaba.com — have hundreds of millions of users, and host millions of merchants and businesses. Alibaba handles more business than any other e-commerce company. Alibaba is the most popular destination for online shopping, in the world's fastest growing e-commerce market. Transactions

on its online sites totaled $248 billion last year, more than those of eBay and Amazon.com combined.” Why Alibaba can grow so fast in 15 years, the answer is that Alibaba catches the trend of Ecommerce and Mobile commerce. Mobile commerce via smart phone will grow rapidly in the future. Today the world is going mobile, Internet users are migrating to smart phone since smart phone is more convenient and as powerful as the computer. In China, 600 million-plus internet users are shifting to Mobile. More specifically , Alibaba created the market channels. Firstly, the
Taobao, is the huge C2C online marketplace with more than 7million merchants selling products directly to consumers, you can find everything in Taobao and even rent the boyfriends on
Taobao. Taobao created a platform for small businesses as market channels to sell products