Alibaba ties up with China Telecom Corp to sell affordable smartphones

Popular name in e-commerce Alibaba group Holding Ltd has tied up with China Telecom Corp Ltd, which is a state owned organisation. The purpose of the partnership is to sell affordable smartphones which are aimed at people in rural markets.

The phones have been dubbed as "Tianyi Taobao Shopping Handsets". As the name suggests, these affordable devices will come preloaded with access to Taobao, Alibaba owned online shopping platform, or its own YunOS mobile operating system. Consumers of the phone will also get free 2G data for a period of four months.

This move is an initiative by Alibaba to make a mark in developing and rural parts of the country, and diversify its consumer base. As a result of this initiative, six handsets made by TCL, Coolpad ,and Hisense will come with the Taobao app. Whereas another eight models made by Ctyon, Uniscope, and Kingsun will run on YunOS, and will also give buyers Alibaba accounts as well as cloud storage.

At present, internet users on mobile devices in China are 557 million. Although, mobile shipments in 2014 dropped from 2013, mobile shopping is still on the rise. Alibaba has previously claimed that it enjoys 86 per cent of the mobile commerce market in China.