Alibaba paid $2B for China's #1 cross-border app — it's gone in six years

NetEase founded Kaola in 2015 — self-operated direct procurement, bonded warehouses, maternal and infant categories first, with founder Ding Lei personally fronting the brand. By 2018 it held 27.1% of China's cross-border import e-commerce market, number one ahead of Tmall Global's 24% and JD Worldwide's 13.2%. On September 6, 2019, Alibaba bought the whole thing for $2 billion, promising independent operation in a dual-brand matrix beside Tmall Global.

The independence was hollowed out. Kaola's supply chain was merged into Tmall Global, its membership folded into 88VIP, and its high-end users migrated over. The team shrank from about 400 people to fewer than 20 by 2022. By 2021 transaction volume had fallen under ¥3 billion — roughly 5% of Tmall Global's GMV. The app's last update came in June 2024; the WeChat account fell silent the same month; the final Weibo post was November 2024.

The end was quiet: the iOS app was pulled at 3pm on March 31, 2025; Android vanished from Huawei, Xiaomi, vivo and Yingyongbao; the website decayed into garbled code; one zombie Tmall store — no new products since July 2021 — was left standing with 227,000 followers. Analysts called it stop-loss: whatever was worth absorbing had already been absorbed, while cross-border e-commerce rotated from quality imports to lowest-price livestreams. Six years after the $2 billion deal, the brand exited with no announcement at all.