The Chinese government has asked Alibaba to sell some media assets because they are used to influence public opinion.

There is no good blood between Jack Ma and the Chinese government, as the recent antitrust investigation shows. President Xi Jinping has now announced a series of initiatives to counter Alibaba’s growth, including the obligation to divest certain media assets. Meanwhile, the popular UC Browser has been removed from Chinese app stores.

Alibaba must reduce investment in the media

Jack Ma and Alibaba are comparable to Jeff Bezos and Amazon. Youtube Over the years, the Chinese entrepreneur has created an empire with the group that includes numerous services in various sectors, the best known of which is AliExpress. However, what worries the Chinese government the most are multimedia assets ranging from newspapers to social media. The multinational also owns shares in Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) and the South China Morning Post, an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong.

According to the Communist Party of China, Alibaba can influence public opinion and therefore must sell some assets and reduce investments in others. They are not which ones, but they will certainly be the ones that allow news against the Chinese government to spread.

Alibaba said that investments in various companies only serve to provide technological support. No direct intervention or involvement in editorial decisions is therefore envisaged. Last year, President Xi Jingpin blocked the IPO launch for Ant Group, an Alibaba subsidiary that offers financial services, including Alipay.

According to information received by the Financial Times, the well-known UC Browser was removed from the app stores of Huawei, Xiaomi, and Tencent for showing misleading advertisements that led users to private hospital sites instead of public hospitals. This is just the first glimpse of a confrontation that will surely continue in the coming months.

Some facts about Alibaba

7 years ago, Alibaba, the e-commerce company in China, debuted on the New York Stock Exchange, where in the first operations it managed to raise the price of its shares 46% to reach a market value of US $ 244,000 million.

Within 22 years of starting as a small company in one department, Alibaba has grown to account for four-fifths of all Internet commerce in China. These are the data you should know about this company, which you may never have heard of if you live outside of China.

1. Alibaba is a global company with more than 22,000 employees and 90 offices.
2. The founder of the Chinese company is named Jack Ma and he resigned as CEO in 2013, and is now dedicated to promoting philanthropic efforts.
3. Ma, who had no money or technology experience when he launched Alibaba, is a tai chi devotee, from which he draws strategic inspiration from it for the company, as well as being talented with languages ​​and being charismatic. Some executives report that he can tell jokes in Chinese as well as in English.
4. Alibaba was launched in 1999 with 17 friends of Jack Ma from a tiny apartment in Hangzhou.
5. Eight out of ten orders placed on the Internet in China are through Alibaba.
6. Taobao Marketplace is the jewel in Alibaba’s crown. This site, which offers 760 million listed products, was a response to eBay’s expansion into the Chinese market and which it finally managed to cope with.
7. Tmall is Alibaba’s luxury market, it sells products from 70,000 global brands, such as Nike, Gap, and Adidas.
8. Taobao and Tmall.com account for 80% of China’s online retail sales, receiving more than 100 million visitors a day.
9. Yahoo invested US $ 1.1 billion in this Chinese giant in 2013, which is why it kept 24% of Alibaba.
10. Alibaba is also entering the sports and entertainment sector by acquiring media firms and a soccer team.

What can we learn here?

China is an authoritarian country with a communist system. Such countries always have tight control over the media and are anti-criticism. Alibaba, with its partial foreign ownership and an eccentric Jack Ma figure, is clearly one serious threat to the Chinese government, something that is both a compelling reason and the only one in a series of events in recent months.

source , alibaba, Tech, WSJ, Tmall