Alibaba’s Newest Business: Modernizing China’s Factories
- Daniel Zhang is spearheading a drive into new manufacturing
- Company wants to provide back-end technology to manufacturers
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Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. helped modernize brick-and-mortar retail with consumer data and online services. Now it hopes to do the same for China’s multitrillion-dollar manufacturing arena.
China’s largest corporation unveiled Wednesday a factory it’s been operating under wraps for the past three years on the outskirts of its hometown of Hangzhou, churning out apparel for clothing merchants on its Taobao and Tmall marketplaces. Dubbed Xunxi, the so-called smart or connected factory is designed to showcase Alibaba’s newest line of business, offering data analytics and back-end technology to manufacturers so they can customize and fine-tune factories in response to consumer demand.