Ali Sports to be the principal platform for Chinese sports

Jack Ma, formerly the richest man in China and mastermind behind the leading Chinese e-commerce company, Alibaba Group, has been making significant noises in the Chinese sports market in the last year.

The Chinese billionaire first entered the sports market by taking a 50 percent stake in Chinese Super League champion Guangzhou Evergrande FC for a reported 1.2 billion yuan ($192million) the year before last. Since then he has steadily increased his involvement in the Chinese sports industry. 

In the last year, Alibaba has entered a partnership with Pac-12 to bring US collegiate sports league games to China. In September, the company, together with Sina and Yunfeng Capital, announced the establishment of the Ali Sports Group, with the intention of transforming China’s sports industry through internet-enabled technologies. In December, Ali’s E-Auto entered an eight-year partnership with soccer’s governing body FIFA, as the exclusive presenting partner of the FIFA Club World Cup. Ali’s sports unit, Ali Sports, ended last year with a strategic co-operation framework agreement with the Shanghai Sports Bureau. 

Ali opened this year with the announcement of a definitive agreement with the National Football League (NFL) to broadcast the latter’s games, highlights and weekly programming in mainland China. The deal is believed to be a strengthening of its ongoing efforts to create its own sports IP portfolio. 

Ali has a grand vision for its sports unit, Ali Sports. Backed by a well-established business eco-system created by the Alibaba Group, its aim now is to integrate resources streamed from its e-commerce, media, marketing, video service, smart devices, cloud computing and financial platforms into one industrial ecology. When all is completed, the business scope of Ali Sports will include the likes of sports event operation, rights management, media operation, business development and ticketing.

Ali Sports is clearly positioning itself. Yu Xingyu, the sports unit’s executive officer, once said that Ali Sports will focus on IP rights and provide its users with all sorts of sports-related products and services through Ali’s digital economic platform.

When commenting on the relationship with other competitors like Wanda and Le Sports, Mr. Yu said, “Ali Sports has a vision to be the principal platform for Chinese sport and provide premium services to people participating in sport by absorbing Ali’s resources and linking well-established digital economic business in China with the sports industry. Comapnies like Wanda and Letv will be our customers under the new eco-business network.”

Apart from the above mentioned partnership deals, over the past six months, the world’s top football clubs Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, NBA superstar Kobe Bryant and other sports companies entered into partnerships with Alibaba to bring high-quality products and services to Alibaba’s 367 million active annual subscribers.

These early movements made by Jack Ma and his Sports unit are believed to be tentative efforts for more significant moves in the future.

Proofread by John Devlin