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.
Masaru IKEDA