Letao.com, the Chinese e-commerce site that specializes in footwear, has raised a fourth round of funding worth US$30 million. It was completed in December but only announced today. It was not revealed who led this financing, but the same three groups that participated in the previous one – Ceyuan Ventures, DT Capital Partners, and Tiger Management – also took part here.
The specialist B2C site raised the same amount almost exactly a year ago. According to the company, it ended 2011 having generated 400 million RMB ($63.3 million) in turnover.
But last year was not easy for Letao and other smaller B2C sites, and CEO Bi Sheng even publicly called for an end to excessive spending on advertising in the industry and vowed to cut the site’s ad expenditure by 80 percent. And so the company is likely to invest the money in other areas – such as its own-brand shoes, where the profit margins are higher – rather than spend it on pure marketing.
Letao operates independently, but also has an official storefront on Tmall.com, Alibaba’s market-leading B2C site which launched an open platform last year that many such smaller e-commerce sites have jumped aboard.
[Source: Techweb – article in Chinese]
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