Alibaba set to invest in domestic media company

Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma poses for the media while touring the CeBIT trade fair in Hanover March 16, 2015. [Photo/Agencies]

China's e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd is planning to announce today that it will invest about $200 million for a 30 percent stake in China Business News, a financial TV and newspaper company that is part of Shanghai Media Group, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the deal.

According to the report, the two companies plan to jointly develop a financial data service that can make use of Alibaba's database of e-commerce statistics, such as sales trends.

In April, the company's finance arm said it will partner with the country's largest microblogging platform Sina Weibo and Taobao.com, a retail site of Alibaba, to help local governments' efforts to improve administrative efficiency and transparency.

Under the partnership, some administrative services will be moved to Alipay, Weibo and Taobao.

Aliyun, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba, will also help local governments build unified cloud systems to tap the value of massive data.

Meanwhile, Alibaba also aims to turn its shoppers into investors as "it has started providing stock quotes and charts on the app of Alipay, a PayPal-like online payment system service, and plans to put financial news and information there," said the report.

Qin Shuo, chief executive of China Business News, will leave the company after the deal to focus on new media and research. Zhou Jiangong, editor-in-chief of Forbes' Chinese edition and a former senior editor at China Business News, will succeed him.

Xinhua contributed to this story.