阿里巴巴集团投资新浪微博

E-commerce giant Alibaba has purchased an 18-percent stake of China's popular micro logging service Sina Weibo for 586 million US dollars.

Alibaba also holds the option of increasing its share of Weibo to 30-percent at a later date.

Sina has also announced it's getting involved with Alibaba to tap into the e-commerce field through Taobao and Tmall.com.

Collaborations are to be seen in the fields of user accounts sharing, data exchanges, online payment and marketing.

Weibo users surpassed the 500-million mark by the end of 2012, up 74-percent from a year earlier.

For more on this, Paul James earlier spoke with Cao Can, CRI's Financial Commentator.