Specialist Sports E-Commerce Site Scores $30 Million in Funding

The specialist Chinese B2C e-commerce site Ku Yun Dong – or, ‘Cool Sports’ in English – has wrapped up a round of series-B funding worth US$30 million. It has not been revealed which firms led the funding. This follows its first round back in September 2010 in which raised it $10 million from the Acquity Group.

The Ku Yun Dong site, at k121.com, sells sports clothing, shoes, and equipment. It was started-up in 2010, and claims to be China’s leading online sports goods store. But, this being China’s massively competitive e-commerce sector, it has very close competition from larger sites with a similar inventory, such as OKBuy and LeTao, although both those mostly specialize in shoes.

A typical Ku Yun Dong product page, emphasizing brands, and even social sharing.

And so the site differentiates itself by being more vertical, covering more sports in a more in-depth way, selling equipment and clothing related to, say, yoga, tennis or ping pong. It covers literally dozens of different sports. Naturally, there’s a heavy emphasis on brands, from global names such as Nike to home-grown ones like Li Ning.

The company’s CEO, Zhu Qi Hong, said this new injection of funds would be used to boost marketing and upgrade its logistics and inventory systems.

[Source: ChinaVenture – article in Chinese]