Source: TECHINASIA
Chinese web giant Tencent has paid US$180 million to take a 15 percent stake in a major real estate portal and ecommerce site in the country, the company said this evening. Tencent’s stake is in Leju, which is a subsidiary of E-House (NYSE:EJ). Leju is in the process of being spun off from E-House for its own US IPO, at an unscheduled point this year. Leju’s F1 filing with the US SEC is here. This new deal comes just eleven days after Tencent radically shook up its struggling ecommerce business by taking a 15 percent stake in Amazon-style estore JD. As part of that agreement, JD will run part of Tencent’s online shopping business.
Leju (pictured below) has real estate listings, a property search engine, and an ads platform to make money from property-related ads. Tencent already has its own ads-stuffed property portal at house.qq.com. The killer part of the deal for Leju is that – according to Tencent president Martin Lau – the partnership “will bring Leju’s rich real estate information to WeChat users” in China. Perhaps Chinese users of WeChat will soon be able to buy a house within the messaging app. That’s not too far fetched since they can already use it to buy stuff or book a taxi.
Chinese web giant Tencent has paid US$180 million to take a 15 percent stake in a major real estate portal and ecommerce site in the country, the company said this evening. Tencent’s stake is in Leju, which is a subsidiary of E-House (NYSE:EJ). Leju is in the process of being spun off from E-House for its own US IPO, at an unscheduled point this year. Leju’s F1 filing with the US SEC is here. This new deal comes just eleven days after Tencent radically shook up its struggling ecommerce business by taking a 15 percent stake in Amazon-style estore JD. As part of that agreement, JD will run part of Tencent’s online shopping business.
Leju (pictured below) has real estate listings, a property search engine, and an ads platform to make money from property-related ads. Tencent already has its own ads-stuffed property portal at house.qq.com. The killer part of the deal for Leju is that – according to Tencent president Martin Lau – the partnership “will bring Leju’s rich real estate information to WeChat users” in China. Perhaps Chinese users of WeChat will soon be able to buy a house within the messaging app. That’s not too far fetched since they can already use it to buy stuff or book a taxi.
