Alibaba moves to gobble up China-based food delivery startup Ele.me in full
Summary
Bloomberg reported yesterday that Alibaba plans to purchase the roughly-60 percent of Ele.me that it currently doesn’t own from the other investors, which include search giant Baidu.TechCrunch has confirmed that with sources close to Alibaba, who told us that a proposal to buy the remaining stakes was submitted to investors yesterday.Tencent tends to favor the investment approach while Alibaba has bought businesses outright — including Weibo, Youku Tudou and UC Web.In the food delivery case, Tencent’s horse is Meituan Dianping, the local services business formed when China’s two largest on-demand platforms came together via a 2015 merger .Alibaba moved to sell its share of Meituan Dianping in early 2017 , leaving it free to double down on Ele.me as it did last year.