The joint venture between Dailan Wanda Group, Tencent and Baidu grabbed funding from Centec Networks and Xude Rendao
China’s Wanda E-commerce has announced securing an investment of US$161 million from Centec Networks and Xude Rendao. This latest round of funding values the four-month old company at over US$3 billion.
This makes the startup, which is a joint venture between Chinese property and retail conglomerate Dailan Wanda Group and two of the country’s largest internet companies – search giant Baidu, and gaming and social media enterprise Tencent, a competitor to the stranglehold that Jack Ma’s Alibaba has on the Chinese e-commerce market.
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The rise of Alibaba, especially post its record breaking US$25 billion dollar September IPO, has seen its Founder Jack Ma overtake Dailan Wanda’s Chairman Wang Jianlin as the wealthiest man in China.
At the moment, Dailan Wanda owns 70 per cent of Wanda E-commerce, with Baidu and Tencent holding a 15 per cent stake each.
This e-commerce venture aims to take the retail empire created by Wanda Plaza malls and bring it online, allowing customers to leverage the benefits of online shopping, with the convenience of brick and mortar stores. It aims to allow more traditional stores to come online so as to create a more unified commerce environment, according to the company.
To facilitate this move towards e-commerce, Wanda purchased China’s fourth largest online payment platform 99Bill last month.
Wanda E-commerce will face strict competition from the likes of Alibaba and JD.com. However, for a market that, according to eMarketer, will be worth a trillion dollars in 2018, Wanda seems to think the risk is well worth it.
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