China’s Alibaba Group has continued to develop its e-commerce in the country’s rural regions, increasing its number of rural service centres eightfold since June last year.
The group now runs centres in 16,000 villages across 29 provinces, up from 1,803 centres last year, according the Alibaba’s news site Alizila.
The expansion is in line with Alibaba’s strategic plan for 2016, outlined by Alibaba group CEO Daniel Zhang earlier this year., building on Alibaba’s 2014 commitment to invest Rmb10bn (US$1.6m) in creating 100,000 rural service centres in three to five years.
Zhang said the priority this year would be “to ramp up our efforts to bring quality goods to rural buyers, and deliver local produce to urban customers, so the rural market can be connected to the whole country and even the whole world”.
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