Alibaba to lower merchant fees after antitrust fine

Two days after Chinese regulators fined ecommerce giant Alibaba $2.8 billion for placing illegal restrictions on the vendors on its shopping sites, the company said it would lower the fees it charges such merchants and invest in new services for them.

“We will incur additional cost,” Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang said Monday during a conference call with analysts. “We don’t view this as a one-off cost. We view this as a necessary investment to enable our merchants to have a better operation on our platform.”

The company’s chief financial officer, Maggie Wu, said Alibaba had set aside “billions” of renminbi in additional annual spending to support this initiative but did not offer more specifics. A US dollar is around 6.6 renminbi.