Chinese search leader Baidu and Rakuten, Japan’s largest e-commerce player, have announced an agreement to jointly invest US$50 million over three years in a joint venture to build a huge online ‘B2B2C’ shopping mall for Chinese Internet users.
Under the terms of the agreement, Rakuten will become majority shareholder of the new, yet to be named joint venture (51%) with Baidu owning the remaining 49%.
B2B2C refers to an online marketplace that links and provides value-added services to both business to business and business to consumer.
The online mall, which is expected to go live in the second half of 2010, aims to provide customers with merchandise from well-known Chinese and foreign brands as well as small and medium sized enterprises at ‘competitive prices’. The mall is anticipated to quickly become the largest online B2B2C shopping mall in China.
Rakuten sure has the experience of running such ventures: founded in 1997 as MDM Inc., the company operates Rakuten Ichiba, Japan’s leading Internet shopping mall with over 30,000 participating merchants and over 47 million items registered on its e-commerce platform.
Baidu, meanwhile, has seen two top executives depart the company just this month (both CTO Yinan Li and COO Peng Ye bailed citing ‘personal reasons’), but that hasn’t stopped it from teaming up with other companies to strengthen its foothold in China.
Earlier this month, word got out that Baidu was setting up a new independent online video company in partnership with Hulu investor Providence Equity Partners.
Baidu is the largest Chinese language search engines. Baidu’s mission is to provide the best way for people to find information online, including Chinese language web pages, news, images and multimedia files though links provided on their website. In addition to serving individual Internet search users, Baidu also provides a platform for businesses to reach potential customers online. The company’s online marketing services include auction-based P4P and tailored solutions. via: Baidu
Rakuten, Inc. (JASDAQ: 4755), is one of the world’s leading Internet service companies, providing a variety of consumer and business-focused services including e-commerce, travel, banking, securities, credit card, e-money, e-book, portal & media, online marketing and professional sports. Rakuten is expanding globally and currently has operations throughout Asia, Western Europe and North America. Founded in 1997, Rakuten is headquartered in Tokyo, with over 10,000 employees worldwide.
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
