Alibaba to sponsor Lunar Year Spring Festival Gala to reach China’s thrifty consumers

Alibaba Group Holding has won the sponsorship for the 2025 Spring Festival Gala show, China’s most-watched event of the year, as the e-commerce giant reaches out to consumers to regain growth momentum.

The Hangzhou-based company signed a deal with China Media Group (CMG), which owns state broadcaster China Central Television, to be the “exclusive e-commerce interactive platform” for the show, CMG announced in a statement on Tuesday. The partnership comes seven years after the tech giant last scored a similar partnership through its popular shopping platform Taobao. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Neither CMG nor Alibaba disclosed the value of the deal, but the gala sponsorship is often seen as a barometer of financial power and political standing, with blessings from Beijing. Several Chinese Big Tech firms jostled to sponsor the most-watched television broadcast in the world. The deal came weeks after Alibaba merged its domestic and overseas e-commerce operations to seek synergy.

The new partnership with CMG, which is controlled by the Chinese government, is the latest sign that Alibaba’s relationship with Beijing is recovering after the market regulator in August ended its three-year antitrust review into the company.

Alipay, the mobile payment platform owned by Alibaba’s fintech spin-off Ant Group, sponsored the Spring Festival Gala in 2016 and 2017, before the partnership went to Taobao in 2018. The role then shifted to search engine giant Baidu, short-video platform operator Kuaishou Technology, ByteDance’s Douyin and JD.com in subsequent years.

The TV show, which airs on January 28, has been a Lunar New Year’s Eve tradition for millions of Chinese families since it started in 1983. In 2018, the gala had as many as 1 billion viewers.