Rakuten To Go Global By Acquiring Buy.com for USD250M
Japan’s e-commerce giant Rakuten announced today that it would acquire U.S.-based e-commerce portal Buy.com for USD250M. Buy.com will be a subsidiary wholly owned by Rakuten next month.
Buy.com has 14 million consumers and more than 1,000 stores in North America. Rakuten is running e-commerce business in Taiwan[C] and Thailand[TH], and also preparing for launching a joint venture company with Baidu in Mainland China(refer to this Akky’s story for more).
Rakuten’s CEO Hiroshi Mikitani announced this week that they had switched their official internal language to English, which is aimed at accelerating their globalization. The company will also set up R&D facilities in Beijing(China), Pune(India’s academic city near Mumbai) and New York City in a few months.
Author Information Masaru IKEDA has co-founded several system integration companies and consulting firms in Tokyo. He has been contributing serial columns to nationwide newspapers and IT periodicals, also he's currently serving as tech consultant for several web companies. See this for more bio.
His private blog is here. 
[...] past years, opening offices in a number of Asian countries, Europe, and the US. It made headlines just today with the $250 million acquisition of Buy.com, a California-based shopping portal with a large [...]
[...] Rakuten To Go Global By Acquiring Buy.com for USD250M Share and Enjoy: [...]
[...] has been actively adding its oversea companies in USA, Europe, China, Taiwan, Thai and planning to go Indonesia. Share and [...]
[...] to their recent investment in Buy.com, ventures in China, Thailand, Taiwan, soon in Indonesia, the Japanese e-commerce portal wants to [...]