Alibaba Group’s Tmall.com Partners With Walt Disney to Distribute Movie Merchandise for the First Time

Tmall.com, China’s largest third-party B2C platform for brands and retailers and a business of Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) has teamed up with The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS), America’s mass media and entertainment company to be the first exclusive distributor of their Marvel Studio’s 2015 blockbuster, Avengers: Age of Ultron (hereafter referred as “Avengers 2”) merchandise on Tmall.com. This is the first time Alibaba Group has opened up its resources in connecting brands and filmmakers to establish a convenient model in developing a movie-related merchandise market made available online for movie fans.

By leveraging Alibaba Group’s strong foundation of merchants and user base, Tmall.com partners with Taobao ticketing platform to collaborate with more than 40 premium brands including Audi, Lego, Ecovacs, Hasbro, Li Ning, etc., to bring a selection of genuine Avengers 2 merchandise to Chinese consumers as the movie opens yesterday in cinemas across China. These superhero themed merchandise are available on Disney’s flagship store on Tmall.com.

“We are pleased to be working with Disney and brands on Tmall to bring genuine movie merchandise to our online consumers. This marks another effort into further enhancing the collaboration between the participants within our platforms and to also fully utilize the resources we have across Alibaba,” said Sherry Lang, Director of Co-Marketing for Tmall.com.

For the first time, Alibaba Group worked with Taobao ticketing platform and Tmall.com to establish a convenient connection between filmmakers and authorized intellectual property (IP) merchants on Tmall.com. This streamlined partnership will benefit filmmakers, merchants as well as movie fans to ensure that a wide selection of genuine movie merchandise is made available to online Chinese consumers through marketing projects.

The Avengers sequel topped U.S. box office for the second weekend in a row with an estimated US$ 77.2 million according to Rentrak as of Sunday May 10, 2015 and it opened in theatres in China yesterday.

Merchandise ranging from superhero themed t-shirts, gold pendants, cleaning robots, and special designed cars are available on Tmall.com:
http://brand-disney.tmall.com/p/rd947522.htm?spm=3.7396704.20000002.d5.MuOb3N&acm=tt-1141523-37080.1003.8.266734&aldid=yyItIWcX&scm=1003.8.tt-1141523-37080.OTHER_1433011197118_266734&pos=1

About Tmall.com

Launched in April 2008, Tmall.com (www.tmall.com) is dedicated to providing a premium shopping experience for increasingly sophisticated Chinese consumers in search of top-quality branded merchandise. A large number of international and Chinese brands and retailers have established storefronts on Tmall.com. According to iResearch, Tmall.com was the largest brands and retail platform in China in terms of gross merchandise volume in 2013. Tmall.com is a business within Alibaba Group.

About Alibaba Group

Alibaba Group’s mission is to make it easy to do business anywhere. The company is the largest online and mobile commerce company in the world in terms of gross merchandise volume. Founded in 1999, the company provides the fundamental technology infrastructure and marketing reach to help businesses leverage the power of the Internet to establish an online presence and conduct commerce with hundreds of millions of consumers and other businesses.

Alibaba Group’s major businesses include:

• Taobao Marketplace (www.taobao.com), China's largest online shopping destination
• Tmall.com (www.tmall.com), China’s largest third-party platform for brands and retailers
• Juhuasuan (www.juhuasuan.com), China’s most popular online group buying marketplace
• Alitrip (www.alitrip.com), a leading online travel booking platform
• AliExpress (www.aliexpress.com), a global online marketplace for consumers to buy directly from China
• Alibaba.com (www.alibaba.com), China’s largest global online wholesale platform for small businesses
• 1688.com (www.1688.com), a leading online wholesale marketplace in China
• Alibaba Cloud Computing (www.aliyun.com), a provider of cloud computing services to businesses and entrepreneurs