An Alibaba booth at an industry exhibition in Shanghai in September. Photo: IC

Alibaba, China's leading e-commerce company, has purchased mobile music player app Ttpod, the Guangzhou-based Nandu Daily cited a source as saying Tuesday.

According to the report, Alibaba started investing in Ttpod, which was developed by a Shanghai-based tech firm in 2008 and has 300 million users, in October 2012.

Alibaba acquired social music website xiami.com earlier this year and established a music unit in the company. Experts have said Alibaba is trying to enlarge its social music and mobile products by this acquisition.

Alibaba started its business from a barter trade platform and is extending its business beyond its previous scope, the report said.

Over the past year, Alibaba has made a string of deals with emerging Internet companies owning mobile products, including online mapping service provider Amap, the Twitter-like Sina Weibo, cloud storage service provider Kanbox and data provider Umeng.

Compared with leading Internet firm Tencent which started in social communication, Alibaba has a smaller advantage in social media and entertainment.

In order to compete with Tencent's Wechat, a popular instant messenger app, Alibaba has promoted its similar Laiwang app by distributing coupons of taobao.com, e-commerce website under Alibaba, which costs a lot, a report from China Business News said Tuesday.

Mobile music products can attract users and have the potential to be expanded to become a social product. QQ Music owned by Tencent has 350 million users.

Alipay, Alibaba's online payment arm, is also expanding. The official railway ticketing website 12306.cn announced Saturday that users can pay for their tickets by Alipay with no charges.

Media reports said that over 80,000 customers have paid for their tickets via Alipay from 7am to 5pm on that day. An expert said that establishing this tie-up to 12306.cn will increase the loyalty of Alipay's users, according to the Nandu Daily report.