Chinese e-commerce site 360Buy has managed to snap up some new talent as its COO, in the shape of former Baidu senior vice-president, Shen Hao-yu (pictured above).
The appointment was made official today by a 360Buy.com spokesperson. Mr Shen left Baidu on July 8th for apparent “personal reasons,” though it now transpires that wasn’t quite the case. Shen had been instrumental to Baidu CEO Robin Li in implementing its advertising platform, and his departure was quite a blow to the search engine giant.
Earlier today a 360Buy rep said:
360Buy is in a very important period of development. We’re in a stage of rapid development, and need to have experienced, excellent management talent.
Shen Hao-yu got his MBA from the University of Iowa in 1997, and then took a number of high-ranking positions – including a stint at American Express – before joining Baidu in 2007, where he served as vice president of business operations.
This coup for 360Buy comes after a year of stellar growth, with a reported US$1.7 billion in sales in 2010 that was followed by $1.5 billion in funding in April this year, as outlined by TechCrunch.
However, just yesterday we reported on 360Buy’s bigger rival Dangdang.com, and the observations of its CEO Li Guo-qing, who claims that 360Buy is losing substantial amounts of money in its expanding e-commerce scope. He said:
360Buy is losing huge amounts of money on its sale of 3C. In terms of selling books, it is no match for Dangdang.
360Buy has been planning to IPO in 2013, but with the somewhat toxic environment for Chinese tech IPOs in 2011, it’s not clear if that’ll be delayed.
[Source: Techweb – article in Chinese]
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