Tencent Might Shop Social Ecommerce Site Meilishuo?

Words has been whirling lately that Tencent is in talks with Meilishuo, one of the most popular social shopping site over here, about a potential acquisition. Meilihsuo later on denied the rumor though.

Launched in March 2010, the Beijing-based startup raised a US$ 20 million round of Series C last November at a valuation of $150 million. The company claimed more than 150 million registered users and 3.2 million daily active users. Being two of the hottest stars (another one is Mogujie) in the rising and promising social ecommerce area – think how hot Pinterest is now in the States – it’s reasonable that people are speculating some big guys might’ve kept an eye on it and are waiting to snag it up if possible. Some while ago people were just speculating that Baidu is interested in buying the company.

In April, Melishuo got started partnering with Tencent’s star product Weixin, becoming one of the first adopters of the Weixin open platform. Through this collaboration, users can share shopping contents to their friends on Weixin.

Tencent is revamping its e-commerce arm after the recent restructure that consolidate the company’s ‘sophisticated’ B2B2C business, buying Meilishuo seems a nice move since the service claimed to bring huge amount of traffic and transactions to Taobao. According to the company, it contributed RMB 700 million worth of orders to Taobao. That said, don’t forget that Tencent enjoys a user pool of more than 700 million users in China and itself is one of the largest portal site in China with heavy traffic, it might not need a Meilihsuo a Mogujie to route traffic at all.