Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) is to keep investing in its YunOS mobile operating software to try and tap consumer spending beyond its main online shopping applications.
China’s largest e-commerce company is to continue to push the adoption of YunOS across a variety of platforms including phones, set-top boxes and televisions, vice chairman Joseph Tsai (蔡崇信) said in a phone interview yesterday.
Alibaba seeks new revenue sources as investors’ concerns about slowing growth have wiped US$140 billion off its market value since its debut less than a year earlier. An operating system can link services such as digital entertainment, health care and travel and allow the company to cross-sell items.
“We will continue to invest in the operating system. We will continue our transition from PC to mobile,” Tsai said.
Apple Inc’s iOS and Google Inc’s Android dominate the world’s smartphones, curbing enthusiasm for competing software developed by companies such as Samsung Electronics Co and Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊).
Tsai has set a target of getting YunOS onto tens of millions of smartphones, without providing a timeframe.
Alibaba, which has made it a priority to reach customers on mobile and other devices beyond the PC, has made some headway with YunOS. It has partnered with China Telecom Corp (中國電信) to sell YunOS phones and has deals to get the software onto TVs.
Meanwhile, the company denied its sales volume growth has slowed into single digits because of China’s faltering economy, the official Xinhua news agency reported, after comments by an executive raised worries over performance.
The company dismissed media reports that turnover on its hugely popular online platforms would grow less than 10 percent for the quarter ending this month, Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday.
An Alibaba spokeswoman yesterday said the Xinhua report was accurate, but she made no further comment.
It came after Alibaba investor relations chief Jane Penner said gross merchandise volume (GMV) — a measure of value for online sales — for the current quarter came in lower than the company had forecast, Bloomberg News reported.
“We are observing some negative impact to the magnitude of the spending,” Bloomberg quoted Penner as telling the Citi Global Technology Conference in New York.
“We believe that our September quarter GMV will be mid-single-digits lower than our initial expectations,” Penner said.
Alibaba’s GMV in the quarter ended in June jumped 34 percent year-on-year to 673 billion yuan (US$105 billion, then valued at US$109 billion) according to the company.
Additional reporting by AFP
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