Alibaba’s New Strategy on Smartphone:Sharing Possible Revenues with Third-parties and Selling Phones on Taobao

Half a year after it was convicted of being a forked Android version by Google, Aliyun throws out new strategies on smartphone manufacturing today: it launches a slightly revamped version of Aliyun OS today, inviting design companies and hardware manufacturers to make phones with it, telecom operators and software developers to build product or services on top of it. What’s more, it launches a Taobao platform, yun.taobao.com, to sell all the smartphones that run Aliyun system.

Aliyun promises to share all the possible revenues with all third parties. To manufacturers, it plans to share at least one yuan per phone sold every month and make it double next year. Apart from revenue cuts from phone sales, other revenue shares will come from virtual item sales, and paid apps, games, digital reading, digital music, online videos, etc., according to Aliyun.

It also announced that it would, together with Alibaba’s wireless division and Ali Cloud Computing, invest a total of one billion yuan this year as income shares to encourage app developers to work on Aliyun platform.

To start off, Aliyun released six smartphones made by local manufacturers, Amoi, Konka, G’Five, ZOPO and Xiaolajiao. Five of the six phones are priced about one thousand yuan and the one with comparatively higher specs with two models that cost no more than 2000 yuan. It’s not the first time Alibaba launched smartphones. Acer, a Taiwan-based manufacturer, was forced by Google not to make phones with Aliyun system half a year ago. K-touch, a local mobile phone manufacturer, once made phones with Aliyun system and was rumored to be acquired by Alibaba, but their cooperation ended with unknown reasons.

Amoi phone that runs Aliyun system