Alibaba Group announced that they have acquired the Chinese cloud storage software provider Kanbox to enter the personal wireless cloud storage sector.
With the acquisition, Gu Zhicheng, chief executive officer of Kanbox, and the Kanbox team will all join Alibaba Group. Gu will still be responsible for ongoing businesses at Kanbox. Alibaba did not reveal financial details for the deal.
Launched in 2010, Kanbox is a cross-platform personal cloud storage service provider and it currently claims to have 15 million users, including over three million mobile users. With the development of the mobile Internet, Kanbox shifted its strategic focus to mobile devices from 2012. Kanbox features permanent free services and unlimited space for picture storage. It not only provides secure cloud storage to individual users, but also offers convenient picture storage for sellers on Taobao.com.
Alibaba said that in the future, personal cloud storage will be a basic service to connect the mobile users and it is an important platform to contact users. Providing personal cloud service to users will become an important direction for the future development of the mobile Internet. The personal cloud storage service is supplementary to Alibaba's eco-system and it will be an important part for Alibaba's eco-system in the future.
Alibaba also said that on the completion of the acquisition of Kanbox, the company will enhance its investment in the cloud storage sector. They will integrate the user systems of Kanbox and Alibaba to enable the convenient and rapid use of the cloud storage service.
Kanbox aims to become a mobile document and data cloud center in the future. It is expected to provide backup, sharing, and management of photos, contacts, short messages, mobile applications, and archiving information.
