(Yicai Global) March 13 -- Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. will explore New Retail applications in the medical services and medicine sectors following an agreement with Shandong Xinhua Pharmaceutical Co., one of China's biggest chemical drugmakers.

Hangzhou-based Alibaba will work with Xinhua Pharmaceutical to advance the use of New Retail, cloud computing and Big Data in the medicine industry as well as other sectors, reported local newspaper The Jinan Sun.

New Retail, a term coined by Jack Ma in 2016 to describe "the integration of online, offline, logistics and data across a single value chain," is all the rage in China's rapidly expanding consumer market. Some of the nation's top tech and e-commerce firms, including Ma's Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. and JD.Com Inc., are battling it out to secure offline resources that complement their existing assets.

Xinhua Pharmaceutical, based in Zibo, began developing projects related to medicine innovations in 2014. It launched a store on Tmall, Alibaba's business-to-consumer e-commerce platform, in 2015 before setting up an e-commerce innovation center last year.

The link-up between the two companies builds on Alibaba's cooperation agreement signed with Shandong provincial government last December, which aimed to promote transformation among local enterprises.