Rumors said China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd is interested to expand its business in Indonesia, attracted by the nation’s per capita GDP growth as well as rising smartphone and Internet penetration. Alibaba may invest in Indonesian online shopping facilitator Tokopedia. Alibaba is said interested to buy a US$500 million stake in Tokopedia, thus it would be joining Tokopedia’s existing backers SoftBank Group Corp and Sequoia Capital. It could also mean that a deal between Tokopedia and Chinese e-commerce major JD.com (a rival of Alibaba) – which was previously reported – would be off the table. In April 2016 Alibaba had already obtained a controlling 83% stake in Southeast Asia-based e-commerce platform Lazada Group SA for a price of US$1 billion.