Online education platform Geekbang secured a Series B. Short video app Kuaishou said it exceeded one billion monthly active users, marking a milestone for the company. Two online grocery upstarts, MissFresh and Dingdong Maicai, debuted to lackluster US IPOs.
Geekbang receives funding
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China’s e-commerce and retail market offers a fire hose of products, choices, business models, rapidly changing content, and more. Here’s what you need to know about China’s online retail market for the week of June 24 to June 30
Online educator Geekbang secured RMB 70 million ($10.8 million) in a Series B. Sunshine Insurance Group invested, Thriving Capital served as a financial advisor. The company offers online courses on programming and software engineering and provides enterprise services to businesses looking to digitize. Geekbang will use the fund for marketing, upgrade its on-demand software platforms, and develop new content, according to 36Kr. (36Kr, in Chinese)
Kuaishou reaches one billion users
Short video app Kuaishou reached one billion monthly active users, Chief Executive Su Hua said in a speech on June 23. The figure counts users from all its domestic apps and global ones, including Kwai and Snack. By comparison, Kuaishou’s competitor ByteDance has 1.9 billion global monthly active users in short video apps Douyin and TikTok, and WeChat has 1.2 billion. Kuaishou’s stock price moved up 6% on the news. Kuaishou went public in Hong Kong in February. Its stock price has dropped more than 50% in four months, from a high of HK$417.8 to HK$194.8 ($53.8 to $25.08) as of Wednesday. (SCMP)
Cooling appetite for online grocers
Online grocery delivery startup MissFresh raised $273 million in a Nasdaq IPO on June 25, pricing its shares at $13, the low end of the expected range. The Tencent-backed company’s shares dropped by 26% on the first trading day, closing at $9.6. The price continued to fall on Monday to a low of $8.8, losing more than 30% since the initial offering. (TechNode)
Three days after MissFresh’s disappointing Nasdaq debut, its rival Dingdong Maicai slashed target for a US public offering by nearly 74%. The company said in an amendment that it plans to raise $94.4 million instead of the original $357 million, reducing its share offering from 14 million to 3.7 million. (TechNode)
Douyin to incubate new retail brands
Short video app Douyin launched an accelerator program to cultivate startup e-commerce brands on June 21. The short-video app is also a robust livestream platform. The program pledges to help 100 new brands to reach millions in sales in a year, leveraging its popular livesteaming channels. Douyin requires those brands to be under five years old. Douyin said in the launch that the program aims to help a new generation of brands mature on the platform. (Sohu, in Chinese)