Lashou, the Chinese group buying service is reportedly downsizing as it’s striving to consolidate business and bring down costs in an ongoing effort.
Headcount in its tech department would be cut down by 40%, an anonymous Lashou staff told local media so. Song Liming, VP of the company who in charge of Lashou Mall has resigned – confirmed by Lashou – his post.
By the end of last October Lashou boasted over 3100 staff.
Last year, following the failure to take the company to public, Lashou launched a Lashou Mall to complement its group buying operation. The Mall differs from traditional B2C services like Taobao Mall or Jing Dong Mall in that it requires the merchants have their offline presence. And all the commodities/items are supposed to consume within the same city with no outbound delivery. It’s more like local store owners operate a virtual stores on Lashou to tap into the site’s traffic and user base, which gives merchants a new channel of marketing in addition to group buying and other conventional ways.
Lashou execs once indicated that the future of the group buying industry counts on a transition to e-commerce model.
Starting this month Lashou stopped advertising effort on aggregator site like hao.360.cn and Tuan800.com, a sign of running low in cash to many industry insiders.
Lashou Mall Homepage
Looks like Chinese main player Lashou has the same problems as American Groupon.
What would Technode Superstar Author Wang Yang say?
🙂