On Wednesday, eBay announced it had agreed to take over Gmarket, a South Korea’s e-commerce marketplace. The company’s shareholders, Yahoo U.S. and Korea’s Interpark[K] also reportedly agreed to sell their Gmarket shares to eBay.
By merging Gmarket with eBay’s Korean local subsidiary called Auction (IAC)[K], e-Bay expects to get ahead and to keep aggressive position in the country’s e-commerce market. IAC is specifically focusing on computer products and electronic devices, and it handled the total brokerage amount for USD2.2B and earned USD161.2M revenue in the last fiscal period. Gmarket is focusing on selling fashion items, and the company dealed with items for USD3.2B and earned USD 220.8M in the period.
In Tokyo, eBay also re-launched a local site “ebay.co.jp[J]” on April 1st. In the timeline, nine years ago, eBay entered Japan in partnership with NEC Biglobe[J], Japan’s second largest ISP with over 5 million subscribers. However, in spite of the fifteen-month-efforts to engage more users and to defeat Yahoo Japan’s auction site, eBay Japan site was forced to shut down for the lack of revenue.
In late 2007, in association with Tokyo-based conglomerete netprice.com and Yahoo Japan[J] which used to be a rival, eBay launched the website called Seikaimon[J] for encouraging Japanese online shoppers to use eBay.com, by translating item introductions into Japanese and surrogating customs processing for importing items purchased(see Akky’s this previous article and Arai’s this article for more details). eBay.co.jp is a new entrance to the website described, and it’s not an auction site but provides translated indexes to each items listed on eBay.com, telephone assistance service in Japanese and video webinars for better biding.
See Also:
- eBay to Expand Asian Operations Through Combination with Gmarket, Korea’s Largest Online Marketplace
- Yahoo! Agrees to Tender Its Stake in Gmarket to eBay
Masaru IKEDA