(Yicai Global) Dec. 9 -- UTour Group’s stock gained by the daily 10 percent trading limit after an online retail and payment services unit of Alibaba Group Holding became the Chinese travel agency’s second-largest shareholder.

UTour [SHE: 002707] jumped to CNY5.37 (85 US cents) at today’s open, and closed at that level.

Alibaba China Network Technology bought 54.8 million non-restricted shares, equal to 6.04 percent of the outstanding total, from UTour’s controlling shareholder Feng Bin and Guo Hongbin, who has a stake of more than 5 percent, for CNY242 million (USD38.1 million), UTour said late yesterday. The shares cost CNY4.88 apiece, a 9 percent discount on today’s closing price.

The Alibaba unit now owns 11.06 percent of UTour. It bought a 5.02 percent stake from Feng in September last year for CNY385 million, or about CNY8.50 a share.

With the latest deal, Beijing-based UTour hopes to further its strategic cooperation with Alibaba China Network Technology and meet its own financing needs for business development, it said.

The pandemic has severely crimped UTour’s main outbound travel business, so it has been exploring high-end domestic travel, health leisure travel, livestreaming sales, cross-border e-commerce, duty free, and other areas.

The company also unveiled a plan to combine with another Chinese travel agency, Caissa Tosun Development, in June. But the merger plan was scrapped on Dec. 5, with UTour citing market uncertainties and other complexities. The shares of both companies plunged that day.

UTour’s net loss narrowed 34 percent to CNY205 million in the nine months ended Sept. 30 from a year earlier. Revenue slumped 65 percent to CNY476 million.

Editor: Futura Costaglione, Xiao Yi