China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is eyeing considerable investments in India through valuable acquisitions. The company is looking to buy out content platforms across print, video and web to increase its reach within the country.
The e-commerce major stated that it looks upon user data privacy and security with seriousness, and therefore stores most of the user information within servers in India.
“India is one of the most important overseas markets for UCWeb. Of the 430 million users that we have on our browser globally, a large chunk of 130 million users come from India,” Shunyan Zhu, president of the company said.
A mobile browser and content platform called the UCWeb is operated by the Alibaba Group. Due to the expansion in the usage of online browsing platforms, it has now started scouting for content acquisitions across various languages.
Thus, the anticipated investments can be made through UCWeb, Alibaba, or its affiliate company Ant Financial. On the issue of data security of Indians, the company stated that it is the leading priority for Alibaba. The company had come under the inspection of the government the previous year due to the suspicion of data theft.
“While we are expanding our own operations here, we are also looking at investments and opportunities in those providing content. These are being looked at across various languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. India has a lot of diversity,” Shunyan Zhu said.
“The investments will surely be substantial as high-quality content is not cheap today. We are particularly keen on acquiring video content as the cheaper data tariffs and rising use of smartphones in India have given a major push to growth in this category,” he added.
The company also claimed that being a global internet company, they treat data privacy very seriously. They claimed to have servers in India, and most of the data of users here stay within the country itself and only a small part of it is carried to the servers in the US.
Also, the company is taking steps to comply with the rules and regulations of the Indian government.