Porto welcomes first service centre from Chinese giant Alibaba in Europe

Alibaba Cloud, which is part of the Chinese technology group, Alibaba chose the city of Porto to open the first of the company’s three international centres. The goal is to “serve foreign markets more efficiently and intelligently”.

In a statement, the company explains that the new centre, inaugurated in partnership with Teleperformance, is a response to the “growing demand for digital services” and will provide after-sales support to 88 countries across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

The service centre in Porto, which precedes the opening, later this year, of two others in Mexico City and Kuala Lumpur, says the chief executive of Alibaba Cloud international technical service, Li Jin, “it represents a new reinforcement of the technical support capacity abroad”.

Alibaba Cloud stresses that the three cities are “local IT hubs with rich talent pools, convenient for creating large service centres with multilingual capabilities”.

The president of Alibaba Cloud’s international unit, Yuan Qian, hopes that the new centres will help the Chinese company better “understand and respect the data security rules of different countries”.