NextFin News -- Alibaba's Amap has announced a strategic partnership with the Singapore Tourism Board, officially launching its first overseas neighbourhood business ranking list—Singapore Street Food & Exploration List—while rolling out core technology services. This marks Amap’s official start of a global expansion for its local lifestyle business.

As Alibaba’s key play in the in-store services arena, Amap’s Street Exploration List is widely seen as a high-expectation bet. In January 2026, in his New Year letter to employees, Eddie Wu named the Street Exploration List alongside Taobao Flash Purchase and the Qwen App as three of 2025’s biggest highlights.

From a single-purpose navigation and mobility tool, to a one-stop local lifestyle gateway covering transportation, dining, lodging, and attractions, and now into overseas in-store services, Amap is pushing the “maps + local lifestyle” business model further and further.

Domestic local lifestyle competition has hit a ceiling, and the entire industry is racing toward overseas markets

Alibaba Group CFO Xu Hong previously said publicly that Alibaba would spend two to three years moving the service sector onto its platforms, unlocking a “new service e-commerce” market worth more than RMB 10 trillion. Amap, meanwhile, was to be “cultivated into an offline gateway that can rival Taobao.”

The Street Exploration List is a crucial piece in turning Amap into a super offline gateway.

On its first day of launch in September 2025, Amap’s Street Exploration List surpassed 40 million users. Over the next 100 days, cumulative users topped 660 million, making it the largest lifestyle-services ranking list in the world by user scale—and the fastest-growing.

On January 7, after 100 days online, Amap’s Street Exploration List announced three major upgrades: it released the world’s first “Flyover Street View”; introduced the world’s first dynamic lifestyle-services ranking covering all seasons, all categories, and all user groups; and expanded beyond food to comprehensively cover lifestyle services across eating, drinking, entertainment, and leisure.

QuestMobile data showed that, driven by the Street Exploration List, the Amap app added 46 million monthly active users in a single month, lifting its MAUs to 996 million. In the 100 days since the Street Exploration List went live, it attracted a total of 860,000 new merchants onto Amap; merchants’ order volume rose by more than 330% month over month, and merchant revenue increased by more than 270% month over month.

At present, Amap has integrated more than 870,000 restaurants, 230,000 hotels, and 50,000 scenic attractions nationwide, building a comprehensive offline service ecosystem. This business transformation also translated into stronger monetization: in 2025, Amap posted its first annual profit since its founding, becoming a growth bellwether within Alibaba’s local services division. The division’s overall revenue grew 12% year on year, shaking off a long period of losses.

That said, as China’s local services arena has entered an era of incremental, zero-sum competition and the market structure has stabilized, overseas expansion—opening up new markets and tapping incremental demand abroad—may offer more effective growth for a late entrant like Amap.

According to data from the Singapore Tourism Board, 3.10 million Chinese visitors traveled to Singapore in 2025; over the same period, the number of Amap users who visited Singapore-related locations also exceeded 3 million. After the bilateral visa-free policy took effect in 2024, multiple airlines added new routes to Singapore from second- and third-tier cities, and residents of emerging cities saw a rapid rise in willingness to travel abroad.

Meanwhile, the number of users on Amap who visited Singapore-related locations surpassed 3 million. This sizable base of outbound travelers provides Amap’s overseas rollout with built-in traffic support.

Moreover, targeting pain points for independent travelers going abroad, the existing “Singapore Street-Sweeping Rankings” feature includes eight sub-rankings covering must-see attractions, must-stay hotels, must-eat restaurants, must-visit shopping spots, and more. It also introduced its first overseas “aerial street view” technology, significantly improving immersion and navigation accuracy for travel and sightseeing abroad.

For Amap, the launch of the Singapore Street-Sweeping Rankings is both a milestone in its shift from a utility app to a global lifestyle services platform, and a pivotal move to break through domestic traffic constraints and unlock long-term growth.

Policy tailwinds for inbound and outbound tourism in China laid the groundwork for Chinese internet products to accelerate their overseas push. In 2025, China’s immigration authorities processed 697 million cross-border entries and exits, up 14.2% year on year and a record high. This included 335 million trips by mainland residents and 279 million by Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan residents, up 15.1% and 10.1% respectively; 82.035 million trips by foreign nationals, up 26.4%; and 30.08 million visa-free entries by foreign nationals—accounting for 73.1% of inbound foreign nationals and up 49.5% year on year.

Against this backdrop, in July 2025, Amap officially launched its multilingual maps. On top of its existing language offerings, it added as many as 14 more languages—including Spanish, Portuguese, and French—aimed at improving travel experiences for foreign visitors in China.

Soon after, Amap announced a fully refreshed World Map service, covering 200+ countries and regions worldwide and offering global maps, search, positioning, and navigation—meeting cross-border needs such as navigation for outbound travel, guidance for visitors to China, and enterprises going global—while supporting 56 languages.

This may become the foundation for Amap’s Street-Sweeping Rankings to further expand into overseas markets.

For Amap, the Singapore project can not only leverage the Street View Rankings to build a base of overseas merchant resources—linking value-added services such as hotel bookings, attraction tickets, and ride-hailing at destinations to complete its overseas monetization loop—but also tap into the official resources of the Singapore Tourism Board to improve overseas POI data and local merchant data, in turn feeding back into and strengthening its global map product capabilities.

Looking across the industry, competition in the globalization of China’s local services sector will only intensify further. And the battleground will no longer be confined to subsidies and low-cost user acquisition; instead, it will shift toward an all-around contest of data capabilities, localized resources, government–business partnerships, and product differentiation. The traffic dividend brought by the continued recovery of outbound tourism from China may keep supporting domestic internet platforms as they deepen their presence and expand in the global local services arena. (Reporting by Xie Xuan, Editing by Yang Lin)