Hainan to cooperate with Alibaba, Ant Financial for e-commerce development

The People's Government of Hainan Province signed strategic cooperation framework agreements with the Alibaba Group and Ant Financial Services Group in Haikou on April 27. 

The cooperation will mainly focus on digital economy, smart services, Hainan's emergence as an intelligent information island, and electronic commerce. Seventeen items are included such as establishing a regional headquarters, building an internet industry characteristic town cluster center, promoting construction of the international offshore innovation and entrepreneurship demonstration zone, generalizing cashless payment and new retail, and developing cross-border e-commerce.

Liu Cigui, secretary of the CPC Hainan Provincial Committee, said that the cooperation has bright prospects as Alibaba is a leading enterprise in the Internet field with a development strategy highly consistent with that of Hainan province. The central government recently announced its support for Hainan's development of a pilot free trade zone over the whole island and steadily promotes the construction of a Chinese characteristic free trade port. Therefore, more investors and high-level talents both from home and abroad are encouraged to share the historic opportunity to invest and develop in Hainan. 

Hainan Governor Shen Xiaoming pointed out in his address that Alibaba group was the first enterprise to sign a cooperation agreement with Hainan province after the central government released plans to support Hainan in comprehensively deepening reform and opening up. The signing ceremony, he said, is more like a mobilization meeting to attract increasing numbers of enterprises and amounts of investment.  　

Jack Ma, board chairman of Alibaba, said that the group will give full play to its superiorities such as cloud computing and big data to help develop modern smart services in Hainan and to lay a solid digital economic foundation for the province's free trade port construction.

The Haikou municipal government also signed related cooperation agreements with both groups at the signing ceremony.