Baidu and Rakuten to build online shopping mall

Baidu.com Incorporated and Japan's e-commerce website operator Rakuten Incorporated jointly announced January 27 that they will establish a joint venture to build a super-giant integrated B2C online shopping mall for Chinese consumers. The joint venture, in which Rakuten will hold a 51 percent stake and Baidu a 49 percent stake, will have an investment totaling around 4.3 billion yen over the next 3 years.

Various cooperation agreements have already been signed by the 2 sides and all the preparations for the online shopping mall have been progressing smoothly. The online shopping mall will officially "open to" customers in the second half of 2010, with a scale larger than any other existing B2C online shopping mall in China.

Japan-based Rakuten was founded in 1997 and is a pioneer and leader of the global B2C "platform mode." It is also the operator of Japan's largest online shopping website. To date, over 30,000 brand operators and distributors in Japan are engaging in B2C transactions on Rakuten’s e-commerce platform.

The online shopping mall jointly invested by Baidu and Rakuten will introduce various types of well-known domestic and foreign brands. According to industry insiders, Baidu's push into e-commerce with a large amount of manpower and material resource input will undoubtedly intensify the competition in the market. Presently, China's largest online retailer is Taobao.com under Alibaba Group. In 2009, the number of registered users on Taobao.com reached 180 million and its turnover stood at 200 billion yuan. The turnover is expected to double in 2010 to 400 billion yuan.