"The Dropbox of China", Kanbox, has been recently acquired by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group.
This has been Alibaba's first acquisition in the cloud computing industry. Although financial details of the transaction were not disclosed, Techcrunch had reported that Alibaba has been focused on cloud computing product expansion since it has launched its Alibaba Cloud Computing unit back in 2009. Kanbox's additional over 15 million users would help Alibaba achieve this vision.
In a statement, Alibaba spokeswoman Florence Shih said, "Personal cloud storage will be a fundamental service for mobile users in the future and will serve as an important touch-point to reach a wider user population. We believe this type of service is synergistic with our existing suite of mobile applications and ecosystem."
20% of Kanbox users access the software via their smartphones. According to the Techcrunch report, Alibaba might use Kanbox to build a similar service to Apple's iCloud. Alibaba had said it has planned to enable users to store backup data through Kanbox as well.
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