Alibaba Business Exhibition in Indonesia

JAKARTA – Alibaba Cloud has just inaugurated its first data center in the country. The presence of this cloud computing company is not the first attempt of Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. embracing the Indonesian market.

Previously, the group known as the e-commerce giant of the world is entering Indonesia through its investment into two domestic trading platforms that operate within the country.

In April 2016, Alibaba acquired 67% of Southeast Asia-based Lazada shares worth US $ 1 billion. These efforts make this Chinese company as the controlling shareholder of Lazada in six countries, including Indonesia. Through Lazada, Alibaba also introduced its trading platform Taobao.com.

A year later in mid-2017, Alibaba re-penetrated the domestic e-commerce market by injecting capital of US $ 1.1 billion to Tokopedia. But unlike Lazada, this does not make Alibaba a majority shareholder in Tokopedia.

Years before, Alibaba has actually been present in Indonesia through one of its business units namely Alibaba Mobile Business Group. This business unit houses UCWeb and its children such as UCNews and UCBrowser.

UC Browser browser has been present in Indonesia since 2012. In less than 3 years, the browser has become one of the most popular. In fact, by 2015 UCBrowser is listed as the most downloaded mobile browser on PlayStore Indonesia.

Following the popularity of UCBrowser, Alibaba then launched the UCNews news aggregator platform in the country. UCNews is a platform containing news of choice from various categories supported big data.

This app can track and match popular topics on social media like Facebook and Twitter and then recommend related news to users. In addition the user can set and choose the topic or cash to read.