Dublin-listed Datalex continues to focus the market’s attention onto its growing presence in China and will announce a significant IT partnership in China in the coming months.

Its interim management statement, which covers the four months to end-April, talks about its fifth Chinese airline customer going live in April and new management resources in its Beijing office.

But it also says:

“We are in the process of scaling our delivery capacity and localisation capability through a partnership with a leading Chinese IT services provider, details of which will be announced in the coming months.”

The soon-to-be-announced China tie-up follows an announcement earlier this month about a collaboration with IBM “on the development and delivery of joint travel retail solutions” which will combine Datelex’s digital commerce platform with various IBM assets including Watson, Analytics and Cloud Services.

The only other concrete operational details in the statement refer to Swiss International Air Lines taking delivery of its digital commerce platform in the second half of the current year.

In financial terms it is still on target to lift full-year adjusted EBITDA by 20-25%, continuing a seven-year run of double digit growth.

Financial statements are usually carefully worded, which suggests that Datelex’s “partnership” with a leading Chinese IT services provider is a different arrangement to its “collaboration” with IBM.

Partnerships are an effective way for western travel tech firms to get a foothold in China, which is still very regulated. And in the aviation sector there aren’t that many IT service businesses for Datalex to get into bed with.