Alibaba, Tencent Spend Billions In Race To Be China's One-Stop Online Shop

[Ron Burgundy]

By Paul Carsten and John Ruwitch BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Alibaba and Tencent spent more than $8 billion last year alone backing often strikingly similar ventures, as the Chinese Internet giants race to create online one-stop-shops to win the digital loyalty of a tenth of the world's population. Before China became the biggest smartphone market, there was little overlap between the businesses of e-commerce leader Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, social networking firm Tencent Holdings Ltd and search engine provider Baidu Inc. Now, as more and more Chinese use their phones for everything from shopping to booking restaurants, the three companies are increasingly stepping over each other - and investing in the same services - to attract the same users. "What keeps people up at night is the fact that they might miss a certain trend or a certain hot company that really is going to bring all the attention and the users in," said Duncan Clark, managing director of Beijing-based consultancy BDA.

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