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.

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