Alibaba says it is buying the SCMP

E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd announced on Friday a full acquisition of the South China Morning Post - Hong Kong's oldest English-language newspaper - after months of speculation.

Alibaba Group Executive Vice-Chairman Joseph Tsai Chung-hsin, in a letter to SCMP readers on the newspaper's website, said of the buyout: "With an age difference between two companies of nearly 100 years, this is truly a mix of the old and the new". The amount of money involved remained undisclosed.

Tsai said the decade-old paywall for the newspaper audience will be scrapped in order to increase readership.