Baidu (NASDAQ:Baidu) reportedly planned to acquire Nuomi.com, an online group-buying service owned by Renren Inc. (NYSE: RENN), at a valuation between $300 million to $500 million (report in Chinese).
This is not the first time for Baidu to spearhead foray into group-buying industry. It rolled out a group-buying directory service via hao123.com in 2010, and then, upgraded the unit to Baidu Group-buying Navigation in the following year. The top search engine also unveiled Baidu Group-buying at t.baidu.com in February this year.
It is presumed that this move targets to gain access to group-purchasing user base and to learn from e-commerce services in a bid to layout in O2O sector via constructing a trading loop based on Baidu Map.
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