Tencent Holdings, China’s biggest internet company, may jointly invest in French retail giant Carrefour’s struggling Chinese operations with supermarket operator Yonghui Superstores, as part of a broader strategic partnership to boost the bricks-and-mortar business through the use of data analysis and mobile payments.

“The potential investment will leverage Carrefour’s global retail knowledge with Tencent’s technological excellence and Yonghui’s operational know-how and in particular its deep knowledge of fresh products,” Carrefour said in a press release, without saying how much the investment will be. Carrefour has also agreed to explore a partnership with Tencent in which the Shenzhen-based company will lend its digital expertise. Carrefour will remain the largest shareholder of the China unit, it said. Tencent said it looked forward to “cooperating with Carrefour in further enriching the retail and services experience” for its users and enhancing Carrefour’s services with Tencent’s technological capabilities such as mobile payment, digital membership programs, customer acquisition and cloud services.

China’s internet giants have been trying to find new growth engines for their business by either partnering with established offline retailers or rolling out their own bricks-and-mortar chains, including unstaffed stores. Tencent’s foray into retail follows an expansion by Alibaba Group and JD.com into physical shopping in what is dubbed “New Retail”, in which online functions such as payments, delivery and logistics management are integrated with shopping in physical stores.

“What Carrefour also wants from the partnership might be the online resources e-commerce giant JD.com has, as Tencent is the biggest shareholder of JD.com.” said Luo Xianfei, Retail Analyst with Northeast Securities. “Now most of China’s retail giants, either foreign or domestic, have all chosen sides with either Alibaba or Tencent. Now we can wait and see which one could win in this fierce war of retailing in China.”

For Carrefour, the investment and partnership is the latest step in its attempts to stem a decline in sales in China, where it operates hypermarkets and convenience stores. Sales declined 5.4% in the fourth quarter amid increasing competition from local chains, the South China Morning Post reports.

German retail and wholesale firm Metro has closed all its convenience stores in China less than two years after setting them up, citing what it said were “drastic changes” in the business environment, including skyrocketing rents in major cities.

Its four MyMart stores in Shanghai, which sold fresh and cooked food, as well as snacks and goods under Metro’s own Aka brand and which were located near mid to high-end commercial sites, closed at the end of September. “Due to drastic changes in the market, like the quick increase in property prices in many cities in China, the management of Metro China has decided to suspend its efforts in the convenience business,” a company statement said. “But this will not affect Metro China’s commitment to long-term development in China. We will keep expanding our sales network in China and continue to focus on four pillars – O2O stores, food service delivery, welfare and gifting and other e-commerce channels, where we can provide added value to Chinese customers,” it said.

Metro announced its move into the convenience store business in April 2016, with the first two Shanghai stores opening a month later. Metro China’s CEO, Jeroen de Groot, said at the time that convenience stores would become a key pillar to support the company’s development, and that they would work in tandem with the rest of the business to provide a further platform for consumers. However it came up against a market full of mature foreign and domestic players, while unmanned stores that are very similar to traditional convenience stores are also springing up, making for a tough operating environment, analysts said.

“One of the reasons could be that the Metro stores were very similar to Japanese convenience store chains like 7-Eleven,” said Luo Xianfei, Retail Analyst at Northeast Securities. “My Mart stores’ fresh food supply chain might not be as competitive as other players,” he added. China’s convenience store business experienced a period of rapid development in the first half of 2017, with e-commerce giants like Alibaba and JD and traditional retailers including France’s Carrefour and China’s Yonghui Superstores all accelerating their presence in the sector, the South China Morning Post reports.

Metro entered the China market in 1996, and now operates more than 80 big supermarkets in more than 50 cities.

Alibaba Group smashed its 24-hour November 11 Singles’ Day sales tally from last year, recording a total gross merchandise volume (GMV) of more than CNY168.2 billion, up 39.4% on last year. The amount is nearly four times the combined online sales of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S. The event was held for the ninth time. Dubbed the Double Eleven or 11.11, it saw Alibaba taking a little over 13 hours to pass its total takings of USD18.1 billion from Singles’ Day in 2016. The online shopping spree has been held by the firm every November 11 since 2009, with brands from China and around the world offering steep discounts on its Taobao market place and Tmall online stores. “Sales of 157 merchants exceed CNY100 million; 17 merchants exceed CNY500 million; 5 merchants exceed CNY1 billion,” said Alibaba Chief Executive Daniel Zhang.

In the first three minutes after midnight on November 11, Alibaba recorded CNY10 billion in spending. Last year it took six minutes to reach the same amount. A total of 140,000 brands took part this year, up 40% from last year, including 60,000 international brands. More than 15 million products were on offer. Alibaba said foreign brands including Gap, Bose, Casio, C&A, Vero Moda, Jack Jones and Miss Sixty. Global purchasers are able to join the festival in China through Alibaba’s delivery arm Aliexpress that enables shoppers around the world to purchase goods from Chinese online merchants.

Nine out of 10 people used mobile wallet apps for payment, with Alibaba’s Alipay app handling 1.48 billion transactions in 24 hours and processing them at a peak rate of 256,000 transactions per second.

Artificial intelligence (AI), robots and drones played a more important role in this year’s event as the sheer volume of products make it practically impossible for employees to keep up, and is part of a broader push by China to embrace AI. Tmall Smart Selection, an AI-powered recommendation algorithm helped buyers to make a decision. The algorithm is backed by the latest advances in deep learning and natural language processing. AI-powered customer service chatbot Dian Xiaomi is another of Alibaba’s tech tools to help make businesses smarter and more efficient. The chatbot can understand more than 90% of customer enquiries and serve almost 3.5 million users a day. In the more advanced “cloud” version made available this year, the service also features the capability to understand customers’ emotion through text analysis and alert customer service staff for priority handling. Once the products are selected, the orders are received automatically by robots for packaging and transport, such as in a newly opened automated warehouse operated by Alibaba’s delivery arm, Cainiao Network, in Huizhou, a city near Shenzhen in Guangdong province. The 200 robots can process 1 million shipments per day. Alibaba is also experimenting with drone deliveries, the South China Morning Post reports.

Andrew Kwan, Founder and Chief Executive of Outwhiz and Strategic Adviser of CoCoon, has outlined 5 technology trends that will shape our buying habits in the future, as reported by the South China Morning Post.

Trend one: Omnichannel. Online and offline retail will be more integrated and seamless. Amazon is now in position to potentially offer O2O services such as buying online and picking up in store, or buying in store with delivery to home. Both Alibaba and Amazon recognize that an offline retail network can be highly synergistic with their already massive online marketplaces. “The proliferation of partnerships and acquisitions by online players of offline players (and vice versa) signals an evolving mindset from product centricity to consumer centricity,” said Robert Hah, Managing Director of Accenture Strategy Greater China.

Trend two: Live streaming. Since early 2016, Alibaba has incorporated live streaming features into both its Taobao and Tmall platforms, to empower influencers to tell stories about lifestyles, brands and products to potential shoppers via live video. In the U.S., more and more businesses are using Facebook Live, Instagram and YouTube Live to drum up e-commerce demand as well.

Trend three: Virtual reality. Around last year’s Singles Day – Alibaba’s annual shopping bonanza in November – Alibaba showed how virtual reality (VR) can be used in shopping, allowing customers to place their smartphones into VR cardboard headsets for immersion in a virtual Macy’s store, where they could interact with products and make instant purchases. Alibaba calls this “Buy+”, and more than 8 million Chinese users have already gotten a taste of this VR e-commerce experience since the debut of Buy+.

Trend four: From “pretail” to retail and back. As consumers catch on to new technology platforms that brands and retailers must adapt, it is immensely important to choose the right retail channel that matches a brand’s target customers, goals and growth stage. A good example of doing this right is Nanoleaf, a smart lighting company that scaled up with different retail channels as the company grew.

Trend five: The sky’s the limit when it comes to creativity. If the e-commerce potentials of omnichannel, live streaming, VR and “pretail” don’t surprise you, consider the recent tie-up between e-commerce and China’s latest phenomenon – the sharing of mobile phone chargers. Since April 2017, three of the Chinese market leaders in charger sharing – Laidian, Jiedian, and Xiaodian – have received a total of USD128 million in investments, according to Crunchbase.

Ikea Group plans to open three new stores in China in its new financial year, according to Angela Zhu, Country Retail Manager of Ikea Retail China. The group would also enhance its distribution networks and e-commerce presence in the country. Ikea’s revenue in China, in its full 2017 financial year to August 10, surged 14% to more than CNY13.2 billion. Zhu said the new stores will be located in Guangzhou in Guangdong province, Tianjin municipality and Xuzhou in Jiangsu province. Next year marks the 20th year for the Swedish company in China, where it already operates 24 stores. In the financial year to August 10, more than 90 million people visited its stores in China, an increase of 11%, Zhu said. Moreover, its China country website – ikea.cn – had 75 million visits last year, representing growth of 24%. Multi-distribution channels would continue to be the focus of Ikea China, Zhu added. This year, the company has opened three new stores in Nantong in Jiangsu province, Harbin in Heilongjiang province, and Jinan in Shandong province. In March, Ikea opened its first pickup and order outlet in Beijing, a smaller store compared with the 30,000 to 40,000 square meter regular Ikea stores. The area of a pickup and order point is only 3,000 square meters, the China Daily reports.