Renesas Electronics Corporation, a Japanese semiconductor manufacturer, has reportedly made it to the headlines for its partnership with Alibaba Group Holding, the Chinese multinational conglomerate. The collaboration is aimed at helping manufacturers by building machines that could network with one another via the internet of things.

According to sources familiar with the knowledge of the matter, as a part of this partnership, Renesas Electronics would supply microcontrollers compatible with the IoT operating system created by Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing business division of Alibaba Group Holding.

Alibaba Cloud incidentally, is the chief cloud service provider in China, which had approximately 45 percent market share in 2017, as stated by IDC, the U.S. based market research organization.  

For the uninitiated, Renesas Electronics sells microcontrollers that operate with Amazon.com’s cloud services and various other platforms, although this is the first time the company is collaborating with a China-based cloud computing organization.

As stated by a representative of Renesas Electronics, partnering with Alibaba Cloud is a necessity for the company to penetrate the Chinese market concerning networked devices technology.

As per industry experts, the internet of things is of primary importance in Beijing's - Made in China 2025 - plan for revolutionizing its manufacturing sector. IDC predicts that by 2020 Chinese expenditure in the industrial IoT would rise to $127.5 billion.

Reportedly, Renesas Electronics has started a store on the Alibaba owned TMall e-commerce platform, the biggest of its kind in China. This would add impetus to the Japanese company’s growth in the region, which is struggling to make customers through prevailing sales channels, cite trusted sources.

Lately, Alibaba Cloud has made it to the headlines over the development of internet-of-things computing platform in collaboration with Intel, which will make it easier for businesses to accomplish compute-intensive jobs like training machine learning and artificial intelligence mockups at the edge of a network.