Alibaba is buying a department store chain in China for $2.6 billion

Not content material with its dominance over on-line purchasing, Alibaba has made an enormous play for conventional retail.

China's ecommerce big has put forward a bid to privatise Chinese language departmental retailer chain Intime Retail Group for $2.6 billion.

Alibaba, which runs the favored Taobao B2C market, already owns 28 % of Intime, and intends to purchase it absolutely to delist it from the Hong Kong inventory trade.

Intime operates 29 department shops and 17 purchasing malls throughout China.

The deal, in line with the Wall Street Journal, will must be accredited by Intime's shareholders and by the Cayman Islands, the place Intime is included.

Alibaba definitely is not abandoning its on-line empire.

"Brick and mortar companies will have the ability to create worth if they're built-in with the facility of cellular attain, shopper insights and know-how functionality," Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang stated in a press release.

"Our mixture with Intime will allow us to faucet into the long-term progress potential of a brand new type of retail in China," he stated.

Alibaba's plans come as its American rival, Amazon, experiment with new offline codecs, akin to a physical grocery store with out cashiers.