On Thursday, Chinese market regulators announced that they had begun investigating the country’s e-commerce giant Alibaba on suspicion of anti-competitive activity.

In a short statement released Thursday. China’s National Market Regulatory Authority said the investigation forced merchants on its website to sign an exclusive cooperation agreement and sold its products on competing platforms. He said he was focusing on allegations that prevented him from doing so.

An Alibaba spokesman said the company “will actively work with regulators in the investigation.” The company’s business operations remain normal. ”

Alibaba’s investigation has been more than a month after the Shanghai Stock Exchange regulator suddenly stopped the first public offering of Alibaba’s subsidiary Ant Group because of “serious problems.”

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Chinese financial companies are set to celebrate the world’s largest IPO. Which is expected to raise about $ 37 billion and raise Ant’s market value to more than $ 300 billion.

The sudden suspension of the proposal also occurred after Jack Ma, chairman and majority owner of Ant Group. Which also co-founded Alibaba, publicly condemned China’s financial system. At a financial conference in Shanghai in October. Ma called a Chinese bank a “pawn shop” and said it was lending to “money-free” companies.

“As a result, many good companies have turned into bad companies,” he said.

Financial regulators also said they would meet with Ant Group in the coming days.

In recent weeks, China has taken steps to curb anti-competitive practices by major tech companies. In November, regulators announced a draft rule aimed at engaging in the exclusive activities of Internet companies.

These moves are in line with US government regulators scrutinizing the business practices of major social media and other tech giants.

Attorneys in dozens of states have filed three antitrust proceedings against Google within two months. Especially claiming that the company’s popular search engine improves the results of its products over its competitors. I raised it.

The US Federal Trade Commission has also begun investigating user data collection practices on several social networks. Amazon.com, the owner of TikTok ByteDance, Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Snap, Twitter, WhatsApp (also owned by Facebook), and YouTube, received an order from FTC on December 14th to learn more about data collection and advertising practices. I asked.