Alibaba announced their first takeover in the US a couple of weeks ago (see interview). And the former primarily local Japanese concern Rakuten has its sights set now on the world market and is making a strong international push.
Last May, Rakuten bought Buy.com in the US for $250 million. Following in June, they took over Priceminister in France for 200 million euro.
Last week, Rakuten publicized their global expansion plans:
Rakuten will use a federation model for their global business. Presented in the video are the companies and strategies of Rakuten, Priceminister, Buy.com and Baidu. Approaching the end of the video is a Q&A session for media representatives and analysts. Here the associated charts (pdf).
Not uninteresting are the plans from Buy.com which indicate a new and extended understanding of the social shopping concepts such as those propagated by Etsy. Buy.com would like to get to a next level of shopping experience with new communications tools:
"In the last 5 years we've made two acquisitions and a strategic investment around social shopping. We have two different pieces of social shopping currently and we'll be launching a new collaborative shopping tool, that will allow users and merchants on our site to be able to talk with other users, to chat real-time with their friends, with their customers and it will create, once again, a stronger in-store-experience online."
The German market doesn’t (yet) seem to be Rakuten’s focus. Buy.com is already represented here.
However it would likely turn out to be a real challenge to conquer the established European market using a French enterprise such as Priceminister.
At the moment, concentration is on the south and east European (growth) markets. But there are certainly a few German candidates which would indeed fit perfectly to the Rakuten strategy.
Related posts:
- The Shop Exchange: Buy.com Goes for $250 Million to Rakuten
- From Social Shopping to Personal Shopping Network
- Etsy 2010: How Social Can Commerce Get?
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