THE MARKETS

Weed Out Fakes

China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba will work with government agencies to eliminate counterfeit goods sold on the company’s shopping websites, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma said on April 23.

The company will trace sellers supplying fake goods on the Internet and share the information with the Ministry of Public Security and other government bodies.

The authorities will then follow the clues given by Alibaba and track down people producing the counterfeits.

“If we fail to protect intellectual property, it may develop into a cancer for Alibaba,” Ma said.

Alibaba saw transactions made on Taobao and Tmall—its two customer-to-customer and business-to-customer websites—exceed 1 trillion yuan ($161.8 billion) last year.

Taobao last year punished 950,000 members who violated its regulations on intellectual property.

“But we can’t penalize people producing fakes. It’s essential to work with the government,” said Shao Xiaofeng, Alibaba’s Chief Risk Of fi cer.

Mobile Music Service

NetEase Inc, a major Web portal operator in China, hit the digital music market by releasing a service that enables users to listen to and share music on mobile devices.

This is the company’s latest effort to expand its presence in the mobile sector as an increasing number of people access the Internet through mobile devices.

William Ding, NetEase’s CEO, said earlier that a full portfolio of the company’s services for mobile Internet will be released in the first half of 2013.

Apart from the music service, NetEase has provided a number of services for mobile devices, including a dictionary service, a news service and a note-taking application.

Currently, there are about 1 million songs available on NetEase, which runs on the iOS and Android operating systems. The company said the service will also be available on tablet computers, Web pages, and client software on personal computers.

NetEase has cooperated with major record companies for the services, including Universal Music, Warner Music, Sony Music, Rock Records and Gold Typhoon. ■