China tech firms partner with ailing SOEs

China’s domestic technology firms are partnering with struggling state-owned enterprises to boost their efficiency.  The Wall Street Journal reports Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu are among the Internet companies teaming up with and even in some cases even taking stakes in state-controlled companies that Beijing is pressing to modernize. In one closely watched tie-up, a venture-capital unit of Alibaba is investing about 300 million yuan ($46 million) in the e-commerce arm of Minmetals Development. The flagship unit of state-owned China Minmetals Corp. is looking to Alibaba’s Taobao platform as a model for a fledgling steel-sales site. Last year Minmetals lost around 4 billion yuan ($618 million).