BEIJING, Dec.26 (Xinhua) -- Ant Financial, the affiliate financial service of China's e-commerce giant Alibaba, mulls to buy World First, the UK-based foreign exchange company, for 700 million U.S. dollars.
It is noted that Ant Financial has been negotiating with World First for months and a deal is expected to be struck within a few weeks, reported the Economic Information Daily on Wednesday.
The mulling acquisition shows growing financing competitiveness of Chinese tech firms in global economic arena such as payment facility sector, experts say.
But an unnamed inside source note that the deal still posts uncertainties as agreement on details are still not met.
Ant Financial has been accelerating overseas expansion in recent years through ways such as shareholding investment and business cooperation. It has twice invested in India's third-party payment platform Paytm in 2015 and went on to invest in Thailand payment company Ascend Money in 2016. In the December of 2016, K-bank, an-Ant Financial backed online lender in the Republic of Korea, got license for business from government. (Edited by Niu Huizhe, niuhuizhe@xinhua.org)
A single purchase
