The newly-established sports unit of Alibaba Group, a Chinese e-commerce conglomerate headed by billionaire Jack Ma, announced that it had reached a strategic co-operation framework agreement with Shanghai Sports Bureau on the last day of 2015. 

Under the agreement, Alibaba Sports will leverage the great advantage contributed by its consumer and digital platforms and work closely with the Sports Bureau to make Shanghai a globally renowned sporting city. 

At the signing ceremony, Alibaba Sports revealed a set of sales data sourced from its online shopping websites Taobao and Tmall. This shows that the total consumer spending of Shanghai residents on sports goods has been increasing rapidly, reaching more than 4.5 billion yuan by the end of 2015. 

Meanwhile, the number of online shoppers has also seen a significant increase with an average of more than 3 million online consumers per month in 2015. The top four sporting goods are for  leisure sports, yoga, fitness and ball games while the greatest spending is on large fitness equipment. 

Daniel Zhang, chairman of Alibaba Sports, believes this data could enable the government to obtain detailed information on people’s sporting interests and provide more targeted services. 

With the help of Alibaba Sports, the Sports Bureau plans to develop Shanghai into an international sporting city.

Back in September, in co-operation with Sina Corporation and Yunfeng Capital, Alibaba Group Holding Limited announced in Shanghai that it had established the Alibaba Sports Group to transform China’s sports industry through Internet-enabled technologies. The sports unit is majority-owned by the Alibaba Group with Daniel Zhang, Chief Executive Officer of the Alibaba Group, as the chairman of the Sports Group. 

Source: China.com

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