Tencent and JD.com have agreed to invest US$646m in Vipshop. Once finalised the deal will see Vipshop feature on the home page of JD.com’s mobile app and on WeChat enabling the online retailer to greatly expand its reach.
“I am truly delighted about Vipshop’s new strategic cooperation relationships with Tencent and JD.com,” said Mr. Eric Ya Shen, Vipshop’s Co-founder, chairman and CEO. “This undoubtedly is an important event for Vipshop as well as China’s e-commerce and internet industries. We, together with Tencent and JD.com, will leverage our respective strengths to form a strategic cooperative alliance aiming to achieve a deep, win-win cooperation and to benefit internet users and consumers. We will develop a holistic cooperation with Tencent on the Weixin platform and expand our strategic alliance with Tencent into more and broader areas. We will explore win-win opportunities in multiple areas with JD.com, including establishing a strategic alliance in collaboration with brand suppliers, and an on-line traffic alliance. We will continue to operate as an independent e-commerce platform and further deepen and enhance our leading e-commerce capabilities in fashion (including apparel, shoes, bags and accessories) and cosmetics categories as well as our strong female user base, thereby offering higher value and better user experience to our customers.”
“The strength of Vipshop’s flash sale and apparel businesses, as well as its outstanding management team, create clear and strong synergies with us,” said Richard Liu, chairman and CEO ofJD.com “This partnership will further extend the strong inroads that we have made with female shoppers, and will expand the breadth and reach of our fashion business.”
Martin Lau, president of Tencent Holdings, said, “We are pleased to become strategic investor in and partner with Vipshop. We look forward to providing Vipshop with our audiences, marketing solutions, and payment support to help the company provide branded apparel and other product categories to China’s rising middle class. We already see substantial demand from our users to discover, discuss and purchase branded apparel in our applications, and we believe that connecting our users more deeply to products on Vipshop’s platform will enrich their online experiences while benefiting Vipshop. We are proud of the role our resources such as marketing technology, payments handling, and machine learning play in facilitating a healthy and diverse retail ecosystem, online and offline.”
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