Rakuten On Their Expansion Plans with Buy.com and Priceminister

Although the main attention is on the big US players, Asia’s e-commerce innovators are increasingly making their presence known internationally.

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?

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Comments

[SJ]

thanks for this post.
what German targets are you thinking of ?

[Modelle torino]

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