Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba today announced that it is investing US$590 million in Meizu, a Chinese smartphone maker that is quickly making a name for itself in that market. In exchange for an unspecified minority stake, Alibaba gains a smartphone ally that will adopt its YunOS, a forked version of Android.
“The investment in Meizu represents a significant expansion of the Alibaba Group ecosystem and an important step in our overall mobile strategy,” Alibaba Group CTO Jian Wang said in a statement.
To date, Meizu smartphones have predominantly been powered by Flyme OS, the company’s own take on Android. It remains to be seen if Meizu will now support two different Android forks or if it will simply adopt YunOS for all of its upcoming devices.
YunOS, based on the the Android Open Source Project version of Googgle’s operating system, comes with a number of services that integrate with Alibaba services including its e-commerce platform.
Meizu was started in 2003. It inially sold MP3 players but began manufacturing smartphones in 2007. It is now among the ten largest smartphone manufacturers in China. It is also beginning to expand its global reach and now offers its devices in a number of countries including France, Italy, Malaysia, the Philippines and Russia.
Needless to say, Alibaba will sell Meizu mobile phones and other devices through its e-commerce platform.
Sources : The Globe and Mail // Re/code