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Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin An Intime Department Store in Hangzhou. Alibaba Group Holding is selling its stake in Chinese department store chain Intime for 7.4 billion yuan ($1 billion) as the company returns it focus to e-commerce, even though the sale will lead to losses of 9.

3 billion yuan. The Hangzhou-based behemoth said a consortium of buyers including Chinese billionaire Li Rucheng ’s fashion conglomerate Youngor Group will acquire its 99% stake in Intime, as well as 1% owned by an unidentified minority shareholder, according to a Tuesday filing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. With Yintai Group’s billionaire founder Shen Guojun , Alibaba took the department store chain private in 2017 in a $2.



6 billion deal. The e-commerce giant cofounded by billionaire Jack Ma harbored dreams of using internet technologies to upgrade brick-and-mortar retail. For example, it once wanted to generate service fees by selling customer analysis algorithms to offline retailers, and take a cut from their revenues if sales improved.

It bought brick-and-mortar stores to experiment and diversify the company’s revenue streams. That plan never lived up to expectations, and Alibaba has said it will refocus on its core e-commerce business. “Alibaba may continue to sell more assets and investors could already be expecting this,” Wang Xiaoyan, a Shanghai-based analyst at research firm 86Research, says in messages sent over WeChat.

“Management’s goal is now foc.

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