A Chinese E-Commerce Company Is Born and enters competition with Alibaba
Dalian Wanda Group, the Chinese real estate, cinema and retail conglomerate controlled by the billionaire Wang Jianlin, announced on Friday that it would enter the e-commerce industry in an $800 million partnership with Baidu and Tencent, two of China’s biggest Internet companies.
The move by Dalian Wanda, one of China’s biggest developers of shopping malls, appears to be directly aimed at Alibaba Group, China’s dominant e-commerce company, which is expected to make its initial public offering in New York in a matter of weeks in a deal that could be one of the biggest I.P.O.s on record.
Dalian Wanda, which in 2012 paid $2.6 billion for AMC Entertainment, a cinema operator in the United States, said it would control 70 percent of a planned Hong Kong company called Wanda E-Commerce.
Mr. Wang said online-to-offline is the biggest opportunity in e-commerce. Alibaba is also making a similar push into online-to-offline ventures.
In tying up with Dalian Wanda, Tencent brings to the table its Tenpay online payment business, as well as access to the 438 million monthly active users of WeChat, its popular mobile messaging service.
Source: NYT
