Spanish department store El Corte Inglés partners with Alibaba and lands in China with Tmall
The Spanish group of department stores and the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba have signed a partnership that addresses from trade agreements to technologic ones in order to speed up digitalisation.
Click and brick giants join forces. The Spanish department stores group El Corte Inglés has signed a partnership with Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba which addresses from trade agreements to technologic ones in order to speed up digitalisation. One of the aspects approached by the agreement is the entrance of El Corte Inglés to Tmall and Aliexpress platforms both through its own brands and the ones sold in its stores.
On the other side, Aliexpress could develop corners and other physical spaces inside the commercial facilities property of El Corte Inglés. In fact, on the occasion of Single’s Day, Aliexpress already opened a pop up store in one of the group’s facilities located in a locality from Madrid, Spain.
Both companies have also aimed at a collaborative work regarding the use of infrastructures and logistics channels. In that sense, Alibaba could profit from the knowledge and logistics capacity granted by the Spanish company and use its physical points of collection for online purchases done through Aliexpress.
Spanish department store El Corte Inglés will also provide stores to Aliexpress as a point of collection for online orders
The agreement between both parties goes beyond all that and is also granted with a technologic development aspect. Within that context, Alibaba gives El Corte Inglés access to an integral package of cloud computing solutions that include big data analysis, which is a useful tool for entrepreneurial decision making in real-time, as well as artificial intelligence tools to personalise the offer.
Last March, the Spanish group of department stores signed a partnership with Alipay. After such agreement, this partnership is provided with even more relevance as they will be able to develop new collaborative initiatives in order to create new purchasing experiences for Chinese tourists.
“This agreement will let us combine physical and online worlds, offering the best possible purchasing experience for clients”, said El Corte Inglés CEO Víctor del Pozo in a statement. “We are writing the future together”, he claimed.
This partnership gives Spanish department store El Corte Inglés access to an integral package of cloud computing solutions as well as to artificial intelligence tools
El Corte Inglés raised a 4.4% its gross operating profit (EBITDA) during the first half of 2018, standing at 335 million euros. Between January and August, the company has registered a volume of business of 7.58 million euros, a 0.4% more than in the same period last year.
Alibaba is one of the biggest digital commerce groups in the world, having China as its main market. The company ended fiscal 2018 with sales valued in 250.26 billion yuan (32.89 billion euros), a 58% more than in the previous year. The group’s earnings went 46.5% up, scoring an attributed net profit of 63.98 billion yuan (8.4 billion euros).
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