Alibaba launches Daraz Flex, an outsourcing platform for Southeast Asia

The outsourcing platform is under Daraz, an ecommerce platform acquired by Alibaba in 2018. Founded by Germany incubator Rocket Internet in 2012, Daraz has a presence in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. The deal is the second time Alibaba has bought a Rocket company, the first being Lazada in Southeast Asia two years ago.

Using gig workers to save on operational costs

There has been a recent uptick in the popularity of using gig workers or contractors as a means to reduce operational expenses, especially among Chinese tech firms, according to Tech Planet. Other internet giants, including Tencent, Baidu, Pinduoduo, and ByteDance, have launched their own outsourcing platforms to find large numbers of gig workers.

According to Tech Planet, these platforms mainly list some non-core and easy-to-handle jobs, such as translation, data collection, content review, etc. Taking ByteDance's outsourcing platform Zhujie as an example, the listed works include subtitle translation, dialect dubbing, body data collection, etc.

China's gig economy is increasing, driven by both employers aiming to save costs through outsourcing and workers wanting greater flexibility in their work schedules. According to AliResearch, the research arm of Alibaba, there will be an estimated 400 million freelancers working in the gig economy in China by 2036.