Alibaba Mobile Business Group firm UCWeb plans to invest Rs 200 crore in India and Indonesia over the next two years to push distribution of user generated content through its UC News platform.
"We will invest Rs 200 crore over the period of 2 years in India and Indonesia to push user generated content like blogs, short videos, non conventional news feeds. Around 60 per cent of it (Rs 120 crore) will be invested in India," Kenny Ye, General Manager, Overseas Business for Alibaba Mobile Business Group told PTI.
He said that the earmarked investment does not include hiring and other business expenditure but will focus only on content generation and distribution.
"We will provide people with We Media platform where anyone can register and start publishing content. We are seeing huge traction for entertainment content in India," Ye said.
According to a recent UC News study, India has 371 million mobile internet users with minuscule contribution from self publishers compared to 600 million mobile internet users in China with 20 million online content creators.
UC Web has plans to add more than 30,000 self publishers, bloggers and key opinion leaders on its We-Media platform in 2017.
"Our aim is to make the UC We-media the number 1 platform in India and Indonesia for content consumption, creation and services. We-media will offer services like insights into topic that users would like to work on through big data analytics, artificial intelligence etc," Ye said.
He dded that UC News will not generate content on its own but encourage users to do so.
Earlier this month, UC News announced a detailed monetary compensation plan for content creation.
"We will have editors who will push content to consumers based on their customisation of news feed," Ye said.
Apart from investment in content distribution and development platform, UC Web has plans to more than double its headcount in India from about 40 to 100 by March 31, 2017.
"In the next financial year, we will increase headcount in India by 50 per cent,"Ye said.
UC Web has crossed 100 million monthly active users in November 2016 and has 57 per cent market share (as per stat counter) in Indian mobile browser segment.
Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang said it doesn't want to be just
another sponsor but a game changing partner to IOC. He said the partnership will help it move another step closer towards Alibaba's goal to serve 3 billion consumers.
Financial details of the deal were not immediately disclosed.
Alibaba's global activation rights will include the Olympic Winter Games PyeogChang 2018, Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 and the Olympic and Olympic Winter Games in 2024, 2026 and 2028 in cities yet to be selected by the IOC.
Ma said Alibaba will use its innovations and technologies to help evolve the Olympic Games for the digital era.
Alibaba will provide colloid computing infra and cloud services to help Games operate more efficiently effectively and securely including supporting big data analytics needs.
It will also create a global ecommerce platform for Olympic stakeholders and to engage and connect with fans seeking official Olympic licenced products and selected sports products on a worldwide basis.
The partnership will leverage Alibaba's leading digital media technologies and know how to develop and customise Olympic Channel for a Chinese audience.
(REOPENS FGN29)
Asked about acquisition plans of Alibaba, Ma said he is not interested in acquisitions as such and was more interested in partnerships.
Ma said he was not aware whether CEO Zhang has any specific plans as of now, but his focus was only on partnerships.
IOC's Bach said the partnership was also aimed at serving the young generation better and tell them that sports is good for life even as he asserted that the stated agenda remains to bring "couch potatoes out of the couch".
He also said sports was global even before the word globalisation came into the picture in the sense of business.
On steps to ensure that counterfeits are not sold, Ma said Alibaba was dealing with a large number of business partners across the world listing a huge number of products on its platform.
"It is a huge virtual world...Today we have world's leading technology to fight this problem of counterfeiting. It's getting cleaner and cleaner but of course it can't be finished in a short period of time," he said.
It is easy to finger point but not easy to kill the human greed behind the counterfeiting, Ma added.
"But we are confident that we will clean it and I can promise IOC that we will together clean the carpet across the room," he said.
