Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd., has hit upon a great way of attracting some extra business, by offering foreign companies a helping hand to establish themselves in China, a country that has grown increasingly hostile to non-domestic technology firms.

The e-commerce company-cum-cloud provider is offering to help foreign firms sell their products in China while complying with local regulations, Bloomberg reported. The idea comes as Alibaba looks for new growth opportunities to hedge against the slowing economy in China, where it derives most of its revenue.

The new program, called AliLaunch, leverages Alibaba Cloud, the company’s public cloud offering, helping clients with both marketing and joint ventures. It’s already signed up its first prestigious client in the shape of Germany’s SAP SE, which will market its Hana database software and services on Alibaba Cloud.

It’s no secret that foreign firms have a much better bet of cracking the Chinese market when they find an influential local partner to work with. They aren’t helped by the fact that China’s government has long championed home-grown technology providers over foreign offerings, and this policy has led to some kinds of hardware, software and services being banned or blocked in the country. This, combined with a tightening of regulations in China, means that U.S. firms are struggling to participate in China’s $465 billion IT market.

Now though, Alibaba Cloud is “able to help overseas technology partners comply with data security laws in the country”, said the company’s vice president Yu Sicheng in a press conference. He added that the company is looking to sign up at least 50 partners in the first year.

Alibaba is already the most dominant e-commerce provider in China today, similar to what Amazon.com Inc. is in the U.S. And just like Amazon, Alibaba is making a big bet on cloud computing to further its growth. The company is also invested in several artificial intelligence projects aimed at predicting traffic, gaging public sentiment and providing real-time comments for basketball games, among other use cases. Alibaba said its cloud division accounted for 4.7 percent of its revenues last March, but as the company’s fastest-growing business it looks sure to command a much larger share in the years to come.

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