Plans for an ambitious partnership between Russia’s biggest bank and China’s ecommerce group have fallen apart after nearly a year of negotiations, people familiar with the talks have told the Financial Times.
Sberbank, which holds half of all Russian retail deposits, and Alibaba, which recorded $547bn of gross merchandise volume last fiscal year, had planned to bring that clout to bear in an ecommerce push in Russia, where more than half the 140m population use the internet daily.
The proposed tie-up was an attempt to leverage state-run Sberbank’s vast client base with the Chinese ecommerce juggernaut to sell items to customers through the bank’s app.