360buy announced today to ramp up its jewelry e-tailing business with partnership with some of the top-notch Chinese jewelry name brands as well as retailers including Hong Kong-based Chow Sang Sang, Shanghai-headquartered ZBird.com and so forth.
The Beijing-based company is targeting at RMB 700 million sales for the effort by year-end.
360buy, or Jing Dong Mall launched its jewelry channel in last November and from then on has seen fast growth of the business, probably a motivation to enhance it.
Jing Dong also said that it will be strengthening logistics service with regard to jewelry delivery in terms of packaging, privacy protection and delivery supervising etc.
China has became one of the largest gold and jewelry markets in the world with a total sales of RMB north of 400 billion in sales while online sales was expected to top RMB 21.7 billion in 2011, up from the RMB 8.5 billion from a year earlier with a yoy growth of more than 155%.
ZBird.com, the flagship among Chinese jewelry e-tailers raised US$ 50 million in its Series C round of financing in last March. Kela.cn, an arch rival of ZBird also raised US$ 50 million in last June from Tencent.
A statistic shows that as of 2011 there’re more than 100 jewelry B2C services in the market.