Exit achieved: Chinese daily deals site Lashou acquired by Sanpower Group

China’s Sanpower Group announced today that it has signed a deal to acquire group buying site Lashou, according to Techweb. How much Lashou was valued at and the date the deal will be finalized have not been made public. Lashou’s CEO Zhou Feng will be replaced by main investor and board chair Qiu Liping. Zhou Feng will become the vice-chair of the company’s board as well as its chief strategic officer.

The deal means that Lashou has finally secured an exit, more than two years after failed to find sufficient backing for a US IPO and was forced to withdraw its filings. Lashou’s IPO attempt came at a time when Chinese tech stocks like Longtop and Qihoo were being linked with fraud, and American investor confidence in the Chinese tech scene was low. But the company had also lost a bit of its small share in China’s already-fragmented daily deals market. Today, it remains one of China’s well-known daily deals sites but its market share is still dwarfed by other sites like Alibaba’s Juhuasuan.

The Sanpower Group is a China-based holdings group with a portfolio that is focused primarily on informatization in service industries. It owns a number of retail chains and brings significant offline resources to the table. The hope is that it can bring its offline services together with Lashou’s online platform to develop Lashou into a bigger and more profitable online-to-offline ecommerce site.

(Source: Techweb)