BEIJING: World’s largest food retailer Nestle has struck a partnership with China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba to boost its online sales by tapping the country’s increasingly digital consumption patterns.

Under the new initiative, Nestle will launch campaign with its diverse products, spanning 30 brands from coffee to baby formula in Alibaba platforms such as Tmall.

“Our partnership with Alibaba is all about the consumer. What is so exciting about China as a market is not only its size or population, but that Chinese consumers are a step ahead of consumers in other markets in the digital way they consume,” Wan Ling Martello, executive vice president with Nestle overseeing the Asian, Oceanian andAfrican markets, was quoted as saying by state-run Xinhua news agency. China is the right place to start Nestle’s next 150-year growth story as Chinese consumers have a more developed understanding and are quicker to adopt new consumption technologies than their global peers and have great passion for innovation, she said. China’s consumption pattern and manner have evolved fast and consumption is becoming increasingly digital with more young consumers choosing to shop online, Zhang Yong, Alibaba CEO said. The volume of online purchases surged by more than 12 times from January 2011 to April 2016 in China, while per capita consumption grew by 27%, according to a joint report released by Alibaba’s financial services platform Ant Financial and a private economics research institute. Nestle strengthened its global capabilities in e-commerce by signing a strategic cooperation partnership with Alibaba in late last year to increase its online sales and build its brands. Half of Nestle’s last year sales in China were online. — PTI