CHINA’S e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and China Telecom Corp. have teamed up to sell inexpensive smartphones aimed at boosting mobile commerce in smaller cities and rural areas.

    The phones, dubbed “Tianyi Taobao Shopping Handsets,” will come installed with either an app for easy access to Alibaba’s flagship Taobao online shopping platform or its homegrown YunOS mobile operating system, it said in a statement late Friday. Buyers will be eligible for four months of free 2G data service.

    The partnership is a bid to deepen Alibaba’s e-commerce base in less developed parts of the country and promote its mobile operating system in a shrinking, cut-throat handset market.

    Six models produced by Coolpad, Hisense and TCL would come with the Mobile Taobao app pre-installed. Mobile Taobao is China’s most popular mobile shopping app with more than 200 million monthly active users, it said.

    Another eight models, made by lesser-known brands including Uniscope, Ctyon and Kingsun, will run YunOS, providing buyers with an Alibaba account for shopping and cloud-based storage, and other preloaded services, it said. (SD-Agencies)