Alibaba to set up mobile gaming platform in China

January 12, 2014 Leave a comment

Alibaba to set up mobile gaming platform in China
9:34am EST
BEIJING (Reuters) – E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd said on Wednesday it would set up a mobile gaming platform in China, venturing into a fast growing sector dominated by tech rival Tencent Holdings Ltd.Mobile gaming is hugely popular in China, home to the largest number of smartphone users in the world. In 2013, mobile gaming revenue accounted for 11.24 billion yuan ($1.86 billion), or 13.5 percent of the overall Chinese video gaming market, the world’s third largest.

Liu Chunning, a former Tencent executive who now heads Alibaba’s digital entertainment business, said in a statement the mobile gaming platform would be offered free to developers for the first year.

He did not say, however, when it would be set up and the statement gave few other details.
Alibaba spokeswoman Florence Shih said the platform would be launched in the near future. “We’re not making mobile games, we’re the platform operator,” she added.

A person familiar with the matter said the platform may have its own dedicated app or could be integrated into existing Alibaba apps such as e-commerce app Mobile Taobao or Laiwang, a social messaging app.

Alibaba’s platform will have to compete with Tencent, which reported revenue of 338 million yuan ($55.86 million) from mobile gaming in the January-March quarter of last year.

Tencent’s social messaging app WeChat, which includes games, is used by more than half of all Chinese smartphone users. The number of monthly active WeChat users grew 124 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of 2013, and figures from domestic app stores showing Tencent’s mobile games are also hugely popular.

In October, Japanese tech and telecoms group SoftBank Corp, which has a 36.7 percent stake in Alibaba, agreed to pay $1.53 billion for a 51 percent stake in Finnish mobile game maker Supercell, valuing the small firm which generated hit games like “Clash of Clans” and “Hay Day” at $3 billion.

It was not immediately clear whether Alibaba would leverage that relationship to its advantage.
Alibaba is widely expected to launch an IPO this year. It has been conservatively estimated to be worth over $100 billion. ($1 = 6.0512 Chinese yuan)

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment