Alibaba Launches New Partnership Program to Boost ‘New Retail Economy’

Alibaba announced the launch of “A100”, a strategic partnership program in Hangzhou today. The program offers companies a holistic one-stop solution to accelerate their digital transformation. The name, “A100”, symbolizes Alibaba’s goal of providing digitalized solutions to a large number of companies.

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“With over 600 million monthly active users and nearly 30 business units specializing in enterprise services including tech-driven retail, mobile payment, digital marketing, media entertainment, IT infrastructure and more. The A100 initiative will be a one-stop shop for businesses to access a comprehensive range of enterprise services in the digital era,” said Daniel Zhang, CEO of Alibaba Group.

“Synergies generated by our ecosystem are creating new avenues for sales and distribution, and catalyzing product innovation to capture opportunities in lifestyle upgrades across China. We look forward to adding many more global and Chinese domestic companies to the A100 strategic partnership program in the near future,” added Zhang.

“We don’t have a entry threshold for A100, as long as the two parties can work together to drive the digital transformation, and create the new business scenarios which the original mode can’t access, then we would like to sit down and discuss the partnership,” said Toby Xu, Vice President of Alibaba Group.

“The integrated solution by Alibaba limits the number of partners that a brand needs to deal with in order to get the services they need. Our experience is, the less people you have to talk to, the more likely you will be successful,” said Dustin Jones, managing director of Fung Retailing, one of Alibaba’s key strategic partners.

One of the early successes of the Alibaba cross-platform partnership is Nestlé. Nestlé has recently expanded into new Alibaba channels, such as Lingshoutong, FRESHIPPO (previously known as Hema) supermarket and RT-Mart. In addition, Nestlé signed a strategic partnership with Cainiao, the logistics arm of Alibaba Group, which enabled the company to consolidate four distributors serving the Alibaba-related business into one and introducing the “One Set” inventory system to fulfill online orders.

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Another successful partnership Alibaba established last year was with Starbucks. In August, Alibaba and Starbucks formed a partnership that enabled the latter to offer delivery services across 2,000 stores in 30 cities through Alibaba‘s online platforms like Ele.me and FRESHIPPO. In December, Starbucks launched its first virtual store in China powered by technology from Alibaba, providing a unified, one-stop digital experience across the Starbucks app and mobile apps within the Alibaba ecosystem.

Featured photo credit to Alibaba