In what seems to be a move to cement its newly-formed ecommerce subsidiary, Tencent the Chinese Internet conglomerate wrote a US$ 1 billion check to the nascent initiative with Martin Lau president of the company reigning over the effort as chairman.
This is the second largest investment of China’s Internet sector trailing only 360buy’s Series C round of US$ 1.5 billion from DST, Tiger Fund and so on.
The deep pockets will go towards upgrading the service as a whole and integrating currently disordered offerings including Paipai.com, QQ Mall, 51buy.com, mobile ecomm business, life services and digital distribution services. The new arm will also keep tabs on the potential acquisitions across the industry.
Starting several months ago, Tencent made some efforts to restructure its confusing, barren yet unyielding etailing operation, trying to make more sense in the business.