By Xie Fang
Bilibili, China's most popular streaming cartoon video platform, received substantial investments from the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba recently, becoming an appealing target for China's internet heavyweights, The Paper reported Thursday.
Alibaba, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), reported Thursday evening to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about the deal, disclosing that its wholly-owned subsidiary Taobao China bought roughly 240 million shares, which account for about 8 percent of the platform's total capital stock.
Spurred by such good news, the share price of the NASDAQ-listed Bilibili jumped by over 7 percent during the pre-market trading the next day.
Chen Rui, chairman and CEO of Bilibili, which is also known to its users as the B Station, hopes that the platform can gain even more publicity with the help of Alibaba.
"By virtue of the huge popularity of Taobao.com, more and more people will realize the remarkable creativity of our platform's content producers," said Chen.
This is not the first time that the two companies cooperate with each other. Back in last December, they agreed that a number of Bilibili's excellent content producers, who are also called uploaders or UPs and each of whom has at least 1 million followers in the B Station, would settle in Taobao.com for the commercialization of their video content.
"We believe that our cooperation will help unleash the great commercial potential of the diversified content in the B Station," said Jiang Fan, president of Taobao China. "We hope that the whole world can see the creativity of China's younger generation."
According to Bilibili's earnings report for the third quarter of 2018, the platform's monthly active users increased by 28 percent and 33 percent year on year on its website and mobile platform, respectively.
What's more, the number of its active UPs jumped by as much as 130 percent from the previous year to 570,000 by the end of the quarter. The video content produced by them made up for nearly 90 percent of the total videos played on the platform.
Four months ago, Bilibili had already received 318 million U.S. dollars in investment from another Chinese internet giant Tencent which raised its shareholding in the platform to 12.3 percent.
