Alibaba and Meizu jointly announced on February 9th that Ali would invest $590 million to Meizu to acquire a small part of its shares. This is the first time that Meizu introduced strategic investment and is also the largest investment of Alibaba after it became listed.
The CTO of Alibaba Wang Jian said, "The investment in Meizu represents a major expansion of Alibaba’s ecosystem, and also an important step in our mobile strategies, which will bring more abundant mobile products and richer experiences."
President of Meizu Bai Yongxiang said, "The introduction of strategic investment will bring strong impetus to the rapid development of Meizu smartphone and intelligent ecosystem."
After the investment, Alibaba will also carry out a series of cooperation in strategic and business fields with Meizu. The two sides will form a long-term strategic partnership. Alibaba will provide resources and supports for Meizu in the E-business, Internet, mobile Internet services, smartphone OS, data analysis and payment systems, while Meizu will provide supports and help for Alibaba in extension of smartphone OS, customization in visual and interactivity of hardware and users, market strategies and offline sale channels, so as to extend Alibaba’s advantages in mobile Internet.
This is not the first time that the two companies carried out cooperation, on October 22nd of 2014, Meizu released its latest smartphone MX4, which ran under the Ali YunOS 3 operating system; on February 6th of this year, Meizu officially announced that it would cooperate with Haier and Alibaba to create an intelligent ecosystem.