Rumors are swirling around China’s e-commerce industry that the US firm LivingSocial is in talks to buy into the group buy site MiQi.cn in a bid to enter the Chinese market.
MiQi is a cosmetics-oriented daily deals site. LivingSocial, which is second to Groupon in this sector in the US, has yet to make a move in mainland China. The rumor, as reported by Chinese tech site Donews, sees LivingSocial seeking to enter the country in some way with MiQi.
MiQi CEO, Ma Qiang, has publicly denied that he’d sell out the site, but remained tight-lipped on whether any other kind of deal or cooperation was in the works.
LivingSocial has been busy recently doing some shopping of its own. Last week, it acquired TicketMonster to enter Korea, and back in June the US group buy giant pushed into Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines by snapping up Ensogo, DealKeren, and GoNabit.
Just yesterday we reported that Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten had expanded its Chinese site with a new, brand-oriented group shopping portal. Rakuten China is a joint venture with Baidu.
China is no walk in the park, however. Groupon has been struggling with its Gaopeng.com, which is a joint venture with Tencent. Some might say that partnering with the Chinese web behemoth was a really bad idea for Groupon, and that Tencent is actually steering Gaopeng to failure in order to bolster its own QQTuan group buy site.
[Source: Donews – article in Chinese]
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