AliHealth, a medical subsidiary of China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba, made an announcement on Friday that it signed a three-year service agreement with Alibaba’s Tmall to operate the online health care businesses of Tmall’s medical e-commerce website Yao.tmall.com. The agreement says that AliHealth will charge some service fees to Tmall. This agreement will come into effect on Friday.
According to the announcement, AliHealth will provide outsourcing and value-added services for Tmall including customer service and the introduction of more medical and healthcare e-commerce businesses to Tmall. Tmall will pay AliHealth service fees amounting to 21.5% of the fees the e-commerce businesses pay Tmall.
The announcement also indicated that both parties are in discussions related to transferring Yao.tmall.com’s health food, dietary supplement and traditional tonic businesses to AliHealth. An agreement on these issues has yet to be reached.
This service agreement between AliHealth and Tmall was signed on the first day after the stock-purchase agreement between Alibaba and AliHealth expired on Thursday.
The stock-purchase agreement refers to Alibaba’s transfer of the operation rights of Tmall’s online pharmaceutical business to AliHealth in April 2015 in exchange for some of AliHealth’s stock and convertible bonds.
Alibaba, in recent years, has made strides to develop in the pharmaceutical, medical and health fields. In March 2016, AliHealth announced that it injected RMB 225 million (USD 34 million) into Wanliyun, a cloud platform for medical imaging, taking a 25% stake in the company. In January 2016, AliHealth worked with Yao123.com, a website backed by the China National Pharmaceutical Group, to launch a platform to help patients find the medicine they need. In April 2014, Aliyun cooperated with DHC Software and the Xi’an International Medical Center to set up China’s first smart “hospital in the cloud”.
(Top photo from http://www.xcar.com.cn.)
