Japan’s biggest e-commerce site Rakuten announced that it will acquire Buy.com Inc for $250 million, foraying into the U.S. market for the first time as it steps up its push to expand overseas.
Earlier this year, Rakuten announced a joint venture with China’s top search engine Baidu to launch a virtual shopping mall targeting the world’s largest online population and has said it is also looking at opportunities to enter European and other markets.
According to Rakuten’s statement, Buy.com (based in California) had revenue of $62.5 million in 2009 and has a client base of about 14 million for its electronic commerce operations.
Rakuten also runs operations in Taiwan and Thailand.
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Motoko Hunt
President & Search Marketing Strategist at AJPR
Motoko Hunt manages the SEO for all of Adobe's properties in Japan and the
APAC region. Prior to joining Adobe, Motoko established AJPR in 1998; she
has been providing search marketing consulting services targeting Japan and
Asia to companies around the world. Her services have made a big impact on
the search marketing campaigns of some of the world's most popular
multi-national brands. A number of her articles have been published on industry
websites and printed media including MultiLingual Computing and the International
Journal of Localisation. She also writes about the Japanese online market on her
blog at AJPR and contributes to several online magazines in Japan and Asia.
She served as a member of the board of directors of SEMPO in 2010-2012, and
is a chairperson of the SEMPO Asia-Pacific Committee.
Latest posts by Motoko Hunt (see all)
- Yahoo Japan’s E-Commerce Revolution: No Fees Model - October 7, 2013
- Rakuten Inc. to invest US$100million in Pinterest - May 20, 2012
- Yahoo, Alibaba and Softbank have reached the agreement on Alipay - August 2, 2011
