China's Dalian Wanda Group, a real-estate, luxury hotel, retail and cinema conglomerate, is working to make its e-commerce platform fully operational within the year.

Wanda E-Commerce, a joint venture which Wanda set up on August 29, 2014 with tech companies Tencent and Baidu, will be ready to offer services in the fourth quarter of 2015, Pingwest.com reports.

The joint venture is viewed by analysts as a potential challenge to Alibaba Group, which currently dominates China's Internet-based sales.

Dong Ce, the chief executive of Wanda E-Commerce, was cited by Forbes.com as saying that Wanda would be the largest online-to-offline e-commerce platform in the world by helping people find goods and services nearby through their smartphones.

Online-to-offline, or O2O, involves people using their smartphones to find and purchase goods and services, often physically close to them.

By cooperating with search engine company Baidu and WeChat developer Tencent, Wanda is able to promote its nationwide chain of more than 100 shopping malls to the hundreds of millions of users of online chat, search and payment services.

Wanda's chairman is Wang Jianlin. According to Forbes.com, Wang is now China's second richest person, only after Alibaba's Jack Ma.