The Alibaba – SAIC Motors joint venture, Banma Qiche, has announced its partnership with Atzuche, China’s leading car rental platform.
The two parties will “cooperate in areas such as auto finance and cross promotion”, Chinese news site people.cn reported on Tuesday.
The smart car company will, leveraging the resources of Alibaba and SAIC Motor, provide online and offline channels to the car rental platform.
“Customers who purchase a smart car by getting car loans can put their cars for rent on Atzuche, where they get money to repay the car loans,” said Li Yuyu, COO of Atzuche.
Alibaba chose to cooperate with Atzuche because the rental platform has a vast user base and a number of cars on its platform.
As of July, Atzuche claims to have three million registered users, and 100, 000 registered cars in 14 Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
Alibaba and SAIC Motor in March jointly set up a fund worth RMB one billion (USD 160 million) to develop Internet-connected cars, WSJ reported. In late April, they released Roewe RX 5, currently the only model which uses the smart car operating system by Alibaba and SAIC.
The partnership with Atzuche is Alibaba’s latest move in its long-term strategy for Internet cars and smart cars.
(Top photo from Baidu Images)