Invite colleagues
Chinese search engine Baidu and Japanese e-commerce site Rakuten have pledged a combined US$50 million over three years to launch a business-to-business and business-to-consumer online shopping mall for Chinese netizens.
This would hardly be surprising; Research firm, Analysys International estimate that last year China's total e-commerce industry was worth 250 billion yuan ($36.6 billion).
Rakuten, which is a major online ecommerce player in Japan has been quoted as wanting to expand its operations overseas and given Baidu already has its own e-commerce platform called Youa, it seems to make sense. Baidu did not seem to be making much ground with Youa so with Rakuten they maybe able to break Taobao's dominance.
I guess that this announcement is aimed at trying to crack the Alibaba.com and Taobao.com hold of the eCommerce market.
Rakuten said it would take a 51 percent stake in the venture, with Baidu to hold the rest. Total investment in the venture would be about 4.3 billion yen ($48.2 million) over three years, it said in a statement.
Source: Reuters
Written on Thursday, 28 January 2010 22:58 by Matt McDougall