Retail News CRM

Tag: data

  • Korean Air shifting most of its data to Amazon’s AWS

    Korean Air shifting most of its data to Amazon’s AWS

    Korean Air Lines said Tuesday it will transfer most of its data and applications to Amazon’s cloud computing platform as it overhauls its IT infrastructure over the next three years. The planned data migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS) is part of Korean Air’s broader plan to invest 200 billion won ($178 million) over the next 10 years to accelerate the company’s digital innovation and transformation, Korean Air said in a statement.

    “Leveraging cloud technologies means we will be able to provide faster and more efficient services that are tailored to the needs of our customers,” Korean Air President Walter Cho said in the statement.

    Cho, AWS Managing Director Ed Lenta and LG CNS Chief Executive Kim Young-seob signed a data center outsourcing agreement. LG CNS, one of Korea’s leading IT outsourcing providers, will help Korean Air move its data to the AWS system.

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  • aCommerce Launches BrandIQ to Help Brands grow sales

    aCommerce Launches BrandIQ to Help Brands grow sales

    Southeast Asia’s leading brand ecommerce enabler, aCommerce, introduces BrandIQ, the company’s new ecommerce measurement and analytics suite. BrandIQ will enable brands to understand and visualize more than 11 million SKUs across 600 brands and 160,000 sellers online across Southeast Asia, enabling global consumer brands and retailers to grow online sales and market share.

    BrandIQ is envisioned to provide brands in Southeast Asia with measurable data and actionable insights for their online commerce strategy. Using sophisticated ecommerce data collection and proprietary machine learning technologies, BrandIQ will empower brands to monitor online merchandise, analyze competitors, offer better promotions, understand consumer sentiments, and improve the overall ecommerce experience.

    “We are now entering an era where usage of survey data is not sufficient to succeed in Southeast Asia’s growing ecommerce landscape,” said Poonpat Wattanavinit, Regional Director of Product, aCommerce. “BrandIQ is a new technology platform that collects data from all the leading online marketplaces to offer brands real-time insights. Through BrandIQ, brands will be able to benchmark their own performance on marketplaces over time as well as compare against competitors in terms of online sales and share of digital shelf.”

    As part of the launch, BrandIQ is also rolling out additional services to help brands and consumers engage in a more meaningful and personal way. Brands can now discover brand advocates and generate authentic product reviews, reward and retain them, and grow brand advocacy at scale.

    “For the last five years, aCommerce has helped brands in Southeast Asia overcome ecommerce challenges, including physical infrastructure and distribution barriers,” added Phensiri Sathianvongnusar, Chief Executive Officer, aCommerce Thailand. “Throughout these years, we saw that data and information is incredibly important to operate a business. The launch of BrandIQ comes naturally as a stepping stone for aCommerce to utilize data and further advance the success of our brands, along with the right tools, teams, and mindset throughout their ecommerce journey.”

    BrandIQ kicked off its pilot operations in Thailand last year and since then has expanded its presence across the Southeast Asian region covering six countries, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. BrandIQ will continue to expand the service to other Southeast Asian countries and marketplaces as the ecommerce space continues to grow throughout the region.

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  • Stocking up on Digitalization to Increase Share-of-Basket

    Stocking up on Digitalization to Increase Share-of-Basket

    With the rise of e-Commerce, Asian retailers are under tremendous pressure to continuously push traditional boundaries and embark on digital transformation to engage consumers. Keeping up with the latest trends in providing the best consumer experience have retailers looking to tech innovations, particularly digital technologies, to play a key role in capturing and keeping customers’ attention and loyalty.

    Technologies such as the cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), mobility solutions, and augmented reality (AR) are driving customer-facing innovations such as digital marketing, smart shopping carts, couponing, and mobile apps – that bring people into the store and keep them coming back. Cloud applications also make it easier for store associates and corporate staffers alike to collaborate and take care of back-office needs.

    The reality is that retailers need to embrace digital transformation and use technology in innovative ways to enhance the customer experience if they want to remain competitive.

    Technology Challenges

    However, rapid adoption of digital in retail not only improves outcomes but ignites new challenges for IT administrators in retail organizations. Among the challenges are how to:

    • Support increased customer engagement with in-store technologies that have high-bandwidth demands
    • Support increasing use of applications in the cloud with a resilient and secure network
    • Ensure connectivity and provide secure access for point-of-sale (POS) applications and electronic payment transactions
    • Ensure performance for real-time applications such as voice, video, and unified communications

    Taking on one of these efforts in the past may have required every resource, but now all of these must be accomplished by the same IT staff.  Also, these changes must be deployed across hundreds and even thousands of store locations spanning vast geographical regions.

    Yet the connective element that brings everything together for retailers –  existing networks are now too complex, too expensive, and frankly, too outdated to support the challenges and opportunities that come from digital transformation. A new approach to the retail network is required.

    With a Virtual Cloud Network, retailers can create an end-to-end software-based network architecture that delivers services to applications and data wherever they are located at global scale from edge to edge, with consistent, pervasive connectivity, and security.

    Faster service delivery on the cloud

    Alfamart in Indonesia is an example of a retailer that embarked on digital transformation by adopting cloud and mobility solutions, and reaped the benefits of a modernized, connected business network.

    Faced with a vast network of over 10,300 minimarts spread across the Indonesian archipelago and basic internet infrastructure in many far-flung areas, it was difficult for Alfamart to convey information in a timely manner across its network.

    The slow flow of information impeded the business’ ability to make critical decisions in a timely manner,  resulting in them not being able to react quickly enough to customer feedback or market trends, and affected overall competitiveness.

    Alfamart decided to connect all of its store employees and partners with a bring your own device (BYOD) strategy and an enterprise mobility management platform over the cloud.

    All store employees are now equipped with the most up-to-date product information, prices and stock level at their fingertips, enabling them to act quickly to meet market trends, and manage peaks in demand for the fast-moving perishable goods they provide.

    This has improved their speed-to-market, reduced training costs by 20 per cent, enhanced mobility across device and platforms, and improved internal communications between management and employees. Customer satisfaction levels have also gone up.

    Keeping systems up and goods in stock at all times

    City Mart in Myanmar is another retailer which benefited from modernizing its legacy IT infrastructure by adopting virtualization. Lengthy downtimes were a common occurrence under their old IT system, which affected their supply chain and resulted in unfulfilled customer orders, negatively impacting revenues.

    The supermarket network implemented a software-defined IT infrastructure and automated certain IT processes, which not only eliminated server downtime but also cut operational expenses by half. Predictive analytics and smart alerts also helped improve the system performance.

    With a new inventory management system, City Mart is now able to gain visibility of their stock across their entire network of 180 stores, whether on storeshelves or in the warehouse. This enabled them to better understand changing consumer demand patterns across different stores, ensure that goods are in stock at all times, and build stronger relations with suppliers.

    Ultimately, the virtualized IT infrastructure supports City Mart’s expanding business, enabling the retailer to meet the needs of Myanmar’s growing consumer class.

    Networking for Retail 2020

    The future of networking is software, and the network of the future is the Virtual Cloud Network. Virtual Cloud Networks allow retailers to create a digital business fabric for connecting and securing applications, data, and users across the entire network in a hyper-distributed world. In this way, retailers can simplify networking and wide area network management, optimize cloud access from all locations, assure high performance for even the most demanding applications, and enforce security and compliance across the network in every store location.

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  • China Unicom more than doubles nine-month profit

    China Unicom more than doubles nine-month profit

    China Unicom has revealed it expects to report a more than doubling of its profit for the first nine months of the year, despite facing significant pressure on mobile service revenues. The operator’s unaudited results show a 116.6% increase in net profit for the first three quarters of 2018 to 8.87 billion yuan ($1.28 billion).

    Mobile service revenue grew an estimated 7.2% year-on-year to 125.42 billion yuan, despite the company’s ongoing implementation of a national policy requiring operators to upgrade network speeds while reducing tariffs for customers.

    The nation’s operators have agreed to reduce the cost of mobile data services by at least 30% by the end of the year.

    China Unicom also stopped charging domestic data roaming fees from July in response to another government directive. Roaming fees for domestic long distance calls were abolished last year.

    In a statement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, China Unicom said it was able to mitigate these pressures on its mobile revenues by optimizing tariff packages and more heavily promoting large data bundles to its customers.

    Fixed line revenues are meanwhile expected to have grown 5.2% year-on-year to 73.22 billion yuan.

    China Unicom’s profit for the nine month period also includes a 1.47 billion yuan influx resulting from an increase in its share of the profit from tower infrastructure joint venture China Tower following its public listing and new share issuance.

    The company added that it is anticipating a seasonal increase in competition during the fourth quarter, but it has strategic plans in place to cope with any challenges.

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  • StarHub offering free local calls to prepaid customers

    StarHub offering free local calls to prepaid customers

    Singapore’s StarHub has started offering prepaid customers free outgoing local calls as long as they have an active data plan. The company will continue offering prepaid customers free local calls for the duration of their data plan, even if they run out of data.

    StarHub offers customers a choice of six prepaid data plan over its Happy Prepaid app, starting at S$2 for 30MB of data and free outgoing calls for three days. An S$8 mid-tier option adds 1GB and free calls for seven days, while an S$25 plan offers 5GB of data and free calls for 30 days.

    “Just by being on our new prepaid data plans, customers can enjoy the best of two worlds – surfing on Singapore’s fastest 4G network and chatting with family, friends and co-workers easily and affordably,” StarHub VP of marketing Donovan Kik said.

    “Simplicity is key and we will continually enhance our services to ensure we deliver the best possible experience to customers.”

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  • Facebook scandal creates opportunity for cellcos

    Facebook scandal creates opportunity for cellcos

    The Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal has eroded trust in digital service companies, which has opened a window of opportunity for mobile operators, according to new research from Openet.

    A survey of consumers in the Philippines, the UK, US and Brazil found that more than 50% of consumers are now less likely to share personal data with digital services companies.

    Consumers now see their mobile operator as more trustworthy than both social media platforms and digital services companies such as Netflix, Spotify and Skype.

    More than nine in ten (92%) consumers would be happy to consider mobile operator delivered digital services as an alternative.

    In addition, 66% would now prefer to pay for services if it means more control over their data, which could even signal the beginning of the end of the Freemium era, Openet said.

    Openet CEO Niall Norton noted that despite having an abundance of subscriber data, mobile operators have traditionally had a much more conservative approach to making use of this data compared to digital service providers.

    “For a long time, this conservative approach to data use has been used as an unfavorable measure for operators’ digital efforts, especially in comparison to other digital-first companies. But times are changing and it’s clear that consumers expect more if they are to hand over personal data in exchange for services,” he said.

    “Mobile operators have earned the right to answer this call. But to be successful, they must learn from the mistakes made by social media and digital service companies alike. Transparency around data collection and opt-in processes are now top priorities for consumers. Operators must bear this in mind when seizing new digital opportunities.”

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  • Tug-of-War: Will Blockchain Bring Data Ownership Back to Users?

    Tug-of-War: Will Blockchain Bring Data Ownership Back to Users?

    Since the advent of the internet, users have marvelled at the ability to create a persona of themselves online – be it in the first virtual communities, social networks, retail sites and multi-player games. Increasingly, a greater proportion of our personal lives and information can now be found on digital platforms.

    Coupled with a plethora of emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G and Artificial Intelligence (AI), we can only expect that generated data, particularly of the individual, will increase exponentially. In fact, the global datasphere is projected to hit a staggering 163 Zettabytes (163 trillion GB) in 2025, according to a recent IDC-Seagate study.

    Even as data continues its exponential increase, recent cyber breaches and incidents around the misuse of user data have also cast the spotlight on the ownership of user data and how blockchain is disrupting this.

    Growing concern over data ownership

    The notion of one’s identity in the online world has evolved over time – once solely defined by a username and password, the increased integration of social media profiles, shopping history and other personal data has meant that our digital identity is fast becoming a reflection of our physical lives.

    Such data can be beneficial for businesses to better understand their customers and provide tailored services and offerings for an improved overall customer experience, particularly in e-commerce.

    However, the issue arises when individuals no longer have control over how their data is used and collected, particularly in the scenarios where organisations monetise user data without the user’s knowledge or request for more personal information than required.

    It’s unsurprising that consumers are increasingly becoming concerned about how their data is used and shared, and policies such as the European Union’s recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are also a reflection of the growing demand for greater ownership over personal data.

    Gaining a foothold on one’s data

    Blockchain, a technology that has seen success in cryptocurrency and beyond through its security, efficiency and non-centralised control, has been seen as a way of democratising data and putting ownership back into the hands of users.

    As compared to the current practices where ownership of user data is held by the enterprise, blockchain would enable the creation of a self-sovereign identity, where individuals control their own identities and personal data and are able to decide who to share it with, and to what extent.

    In addition, blockchain offers the possibility of micro-incentivising people to share data at their own will, which can significantly disrupt current ways of working for industries such as advertising and content.

    Organisations will need to come to terms with this new reality and be aligned with the changing mindsets and desires of their users when it comes to management of personal data. While a selfsovereign identity that is enabled by blockchain could revolutionise how personal data is managed, it does not come about without hurdles.

    For starters, the burden of managing and allocating access would have to be borne by the individual. Education would be crucial to familiarise users themselves with treating and managing data as assets that they now control and use to their benefit. Additionally, users themselves should be aware of the pros and cons of self-managing their data, rather than having organisations manage these on their behalf.

    At the broader level, this new approach also requires organisations to evaluate and adapt existing systems to ensure compatibility and that they continue to deliver the same user-friendly experience for their users.

    Despite the hurdles, blockchain will undoubtedly bring about changes with regard to personal data and digital identities as barriers to adoption gradually decrease for both enterprises and individual consumers. Given the rallying call for organisations to be more open about the data they collect about their users and how it is used, organisations will need to be prepared for the possibility of a future of acquiring data on the conditions of their users.

    Blockchain may pave the road to a future where large scale cyber breaches involving millions of stolen personal identities could be a thing of the past. Organisations too will need to evolve accordingly and bear responsibility for the just use and management of user data. After all, personal data belongs solely to the individual, and blockchain might well enable users to regain that control.

     

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  • Megaport supporting Google Cloud Partner Interconnect

    Megaport supporting Google Cloud Partner Interconnect

    Australia-based network as a service (NaaS) provider Megaport has introduced support for Google Cloud’s Partner Interconnect with its global SDN.

    The new service will allow Megaport customers to provide connectivity from their facility to the nearest Google edge PoP.

    Customers can select from a range of sub-rate interface speeds varying from 50Mbps up to 10Gpbs.

    The Partner Interconnect service is available across the Megaport SDN, which spans over 200 data centers globally. Megaport is enabling deeper integration between the SDN and Google Cloud via its API to enable provisioning of network capacity to Google virtual private clouds.

    “Scalable connectivity to Google Cloud Platform ensures that cloud-enabled applications perform to meet mission-critical business requirements,” Megaport CEO Vincent English said.

    “Google Cloud brings tremendous value to the Megaport Ecosystem and empowers our customers to address a wide variety of business needs. We have been working with Google Cloud since our inception and we are excited to grow and evolve our integration to ensure the next generation of business growth.”

    Megaport also recently announced a partnership with Colt Data Centre Services to allow Colt customers to access direct connectivity to a range of major cloud service providers via the Megaport SDN.

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  • Telstra to launch unlimited mobile data plan

    Telstra to launch unlimited mobile data plan

    Australia’s Telstra will tomorrow launch Australia’s first unlimited smartphone-based mobile data plan, although the “unlimited” plan is subject to a data cap at 40GB.

    The new A$69 ($52) Telstra Endless Data BYO plans also come with unlimited talk, text and MMS to standard domestic numbers as well as unlimited Wi-Fi data at Telstra’s network of Telstra Air hotspots.

    Data will be uncapped up to 40GB, after which speeds will be limited to 1.5Mbps, and lower during peak hours. The plan is also subject to Telstra’s fair use policy, Telstra said.

    Telstra boasts a 4G population coverage of more than 99% with a 3G coverage of 99.4%. The company’s 4G network covers a landmass area of 1.6 million square kilometers.

    To further augment its coverage, Telstra has also announced the launch of a new intelligent antenna solution designed to improve mobile coverage or provide coverage to most places it is unavailable.

    The Telstra Go Repeater is available in a stationary version designed for residential and commercial premises, as well as a portable version designed to improve coverage in a road or sea vehicle.

    It works by receiving mobile signals through an external antenna and then enhancing and re-transmitting this signal to a single indoor or in vehicle antenna. The repeater operates on Telstra’s 3G and 4G networks, including its “4GX” LTE-Advanced network.

  • Juniper enhances cybersecurity platform

    Juniper enhances cybersecurity platform

    Juniper Networks has announced new enhancements to its unified cybersecurity platform, aimed at helping customers run their businesses with confidence and efficiency across locations and clouds.

    These enhancements simplify security operations by accelerating time to detection and orchestrating mitigation. The result is improved productivity and a stronger security posture across enterprise networks and cloud workloads whether in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or private data centers.

    To give security teams a simplified and comprehensive view of threats and enable one-click mitigation, Juniper Networks SRX Series Next-Generation Firewalls now feed directly into the Advanced Threat Prevention (ATP) Appliance. This integration enables the aggregation and correlation of security events from various Juniper and third-party sources into a consolidated timeline view of all threats in the network, and allows security teams to teams  prioritize critical alerts and mitigate threats with one click.

    Furthering its promise to use the entire network for security enforcement, the Juniper ATP Appliance is bringing its built-in threat behavior analytics and one-touch mitigation to Junos Space Security Director Policy Enforcer, offering a unified view of threat behavior across the security fabric for extended remediation. This integration enables adaptive malware detection that triggers automated policy enforcement for a substantially hardened security posture across networks and cloud environments.

    Security Director Policy Enforcer is meanwhile now integrated with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Juniper extends multicloud workload protection and consistent security across multicloud environments, securing workloads in AWS Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs).

    As part of its commitment to global cybersecurity, Juniper Networks now has data centers for Juniper Sky ATP in Asia Pacific and Canada, in addition to its existing data centers in the US and Europe. The company is also  furthering its commitment to an open and unified approach to cybersecurity by joining the Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA), an organization dedicated to improving the security of the global digital ecosystems through cyber threat information sharing.

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  • AirAsia rides on big data analytics

    AirAsia rides on big data analytics

    The airline that made flying more affordable for Malaysians since 2001 is now looking to up its game by using big data analytics to mine data on 80 million unique passengers at its disposal, to personalise and anticipate travelling patterns for marketing purposes.

    “We have a database of about 80 million unique individuals. We know where they like to fly to, or when they like to fly during the year, or how many holidays they take maybe during the year.

    “Now, the marketing side has already started employing data analytics there, to actually start targeting certain portions of passengers on specific dates or specific periods of the year that they go on holiday,” AirAsia Bhd CEO Riad Asmat told last week.

    “We can be more specific and will go further, not now but at one point, where maybe we can offer you as an individual, your preferred destination on the right date … and say we will give you a nice package at a discounted rate and all that,” he added.

    On data protection, Riad gave an assurance that the data trove is one of its most important assets which, as a “very responsible organisation”, the company is very protective of at all times and use responsibly.

    “We don’t share our information with any other parties but ourselves. If you notice what we are doing is we bring expertise inhouse. We employ people and bring in expertise,” he explained.

    Riad said while the airline is utilising its current resources, it is also on a continuous lookout for expertise and new technology.

    Besides marketing and ticket purchases, digitalisation has enabled AirAsia to improve operational efficiency, through the use of data in features such as live reporting and operations review from the previous day, made available to the team on a daily basis.

    This, according to Riad, enables the team to identify and tackle challenges and come up with preventive measures.

    “The airline bit is the traditional bit but it will be 100 times enhanced with digitalisation,” he quipped.

  • True Move told to consider compensation over data leak

    True Move told to consider compensation over data leak

    Thai telecoms regulator NBTC has instructed mobile operator True Move H to assess the impact of its recent personal data leak and offer compensation to any affected customers.

    The regulator also plans to conduct a formal investigation into the incident and consider imposing punishments, and issue a letter demanding that mobile operators take appropriate steps to prevent similar breaches in the future.

    A security researcher recently revealed that the identity documents of up to 45,736 customers of True subsidiary iTrueMart had been exposed by being stored in a publicly-accessible Amazon S3 data bucket. The company also took more than a month to finally make the cache of files private.

    Researcher Niall Merrigan discovered the cache by scanning certificate transparency logs created when someone creates a new security certificate.

    Yet True Move H and parent True Corp are continuing to characterize the action as a data breach. A True Corp executive told that the company is considering taking legal action for hacking the data from the system, stating that he used “special tools to access data which he has no right to get into.”

    But a cloud expert noted that because the default setting for the AWS S3 service is private, True had to have intentionally set the data to public.

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  • Priceza Indonesia data shows Ramadan boom

    Priceza Indonesia data shows Ramadan boom

    Ramadan month is the most popular time for online shopping in Indonesia, data from shopping search engine and price comparison platform Priceza Indonesia shows.

    Click rates increased by 26 per cent compared to the previous month, its figures show, while transaction values rose by as much as 16 per cent.

    Priceza Indonesia says this is in line with conventional shopping, where the turnover of traditional traders can double and even triple in some cases as Lebaran (Eid Al Fitr) approaches.

    During the Ramadan period to its peak on Lebaran day there was a “significant transaction boom”, says Priceza Indonesia co-founder/country head Bayu Irawan.

    “This means the traditional month of Ramadan is still going to be effective for e-commerce promotional programs.”

    Indonesian consumers tend to spend their time shopping online during the holiday, says Priceza Indonesia. Its data shows the top three categories during the month are fashion, electronics and smartphones.

    Priceza was established in Thailand in 2010, with the Indonesian offshoot starting in 2013 with nearly 4.5 million users a month. The platform is also active in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Vietnam.

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  • How to action data from your business

    How to action data from your business

    E-commerce websites have the ability to collect a ridiculous amount of information.

    With access to such large data sets it’s no wonder so many e-commerce businesses are touting about how “big data” and “business intelligence” (“BI”) sets them apart from the pack.

    We certainly agree that the insights that can be generated from data represent a significant opportunity for a business of any size, but for all the focus on the systems, tools, and resources, the other side of BI needs just as much consideration – that is, what are you doing with the information?

    The ability to answer this question is what turns the data from numbers into actionable insights. While there is no shortage to the questions and solutions that data can provide, BI gets discussed in such general terms that it’s not always clear how one takes data and uses it to make actionable recommendations. So, how do you turn data into actionable insights?

    First you need to find patterns in your data.

    A year has a lot of data points, so start with peak sales period(s). Look at your data, including the age and gender shopping on your website during that key period, it can offer meaningful insights that can be actioned to improve performance over that period. We’ve found that there are patterns to indicate when certain customers tend to shop over others.

    For instance, we found that on certain key dates male customers aged 18-24 were more likely to go online and shop than other days. We also found that during other key dates in the period, woman aged above 35 years were shopping on certain dates but what they were purchasing on those dates were largely for younger males, suggesting that they were purchasing on behalf of their children.

    With this data in hand, we then determined what our key objectives were for this period to best identify how to tailor a marketing plan to achieve them; looking to grow revenue so we used the data to launch specific marketing campaigns aimed at increasing conversion rates, capturing new customers and recovering customers who had not purchased for over 360 days. With these goals in hand, we identified specific products that were likely to resonate by customer type before creating multiple creative assets with the product, tone of voice, message/visuals all geared towards each specific customer type. Using these assets to place them in emails and media where each of these customer sets were most likely to view it in order to maximise the exposure, click through rate and conversion. And finally, we launched look-a-like campaigns across social media to capture new customers.

    While this data was used to find ways to enhance key sales periods from a marketing perspective, the insights can be used to make decisions from as early on as setting the season’s buying plan. Setting a buying plan that considers what cross-sell opportunities exist to the shopper at hand – without compromising the brand proposition – would provide an even stronger opportunity to maximise sales. Simply knowing who you are buying for and what dates they are likely to buy let you both target your messaging and curate what you’re selling to meet that customers’ needs.

    The specific implementation is an important component – what, when and where you are advertising needs to be aligned with the insights you’ve found and the assortment aligned to your customer, but these serve as examples into how you can use your data to action meaningful change to your marketing and buying initiatives.

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  • Alibaba Throws $486 Million Behind Big Data

    With plans to expand its offline presence, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. will be investing $486 million in a China-based big-data firm centered on the hotel, catering and retail industries.

    A filing to the Shenzhen stock exchange today shows that the company is set to buy a 38 percent stake in Beijing Shiji Information Technology Co. Ltd. through its subsidiary Alibaba Investment Ltd. The e-commerce giant is shifting into what it calls a “New Retail” strategic cooperation and intends to leverage big data as part of a bigger push to restructure the domestic retail market, which has seen troubling times over the past few years.

    Led by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, Alibaba reported 61 percent growth in quarterly revenue last November, beating retail and financial analysts’ expectations. “We are seeing the early results from our efforts to integrate online and offline with our New Retail strategy, and consumers have benefited from access to high-quality products, improved customer experience and the tremendous convenience of shopping anytime, anywhere,” CEO Daniel Zhang said at the time.

    Already dominating the country’s online shopping market, the e-commerce and technology giant has been experimenting with brick-and-mortar retail, reportedly investing billions in physical stores as it faces growing competition with rival company Tencent Holdings Ltd. Ma also announced a plan last fall to spend $15 billion on research and development within three years, with the goal of serving 2 billion customers and creating 100 million job opportunities over the next two decades.

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