The Alibaba Group announced today that it will invest $590 million in Meizu Technology Limited. Alibaba will acquire a minority stake in Meizu Technology Limited. The exact figure hasn't been disclosed.

But why?

With a market valuation of $213 billion, the Alibaba Group's partnership with Meizu would help the latter reach out to a much larger audience, and sell more handsets as a direct result. Recently, Meizu revealed that it had sold 1.5 million Smartphones in the month of January 2015 alone.

Meizu and Alibaba "will collaborate at both strategic and business levels to achieve a deeper integration of Meizu's hardware and Alibaba Group's mobile operating system."

Additionally, Alibaba will push Meizu devices loaded with YunOS (based on Android) to a larger audience, as a result of this investment.