US chain Wal-Mart has invested in Chinese e-commerce consumer electronics seller 360buy.com (京東商城), as the world’s largest retailer steps up its presence in China, a report said yesterday.
Wal-Mart has teamed up with another five investors to inject US$500 million into 360buy, whose rivals include Taobao (淘寶網), the dominant online marketplace owned by Alibaba (阿里巴巴), the Financial Times said, without citing sources.
A spokeswoman for 360buy declined to comment when contacted by reporters and no one at Wal-Mart’s Beijing office was -immediately available to comment. The US chain has almost 200 outlets in China, according to its Web site.
Wal-Mart last month launched a no-frills store format in China targeting low-income and rural consumers, the Financial Times said.
It opened a “compact hypermarket” in the eastern province of Jiangxi that is expected to be the first of a series of stores using a bare-bones model developed in Latin America.
The retailer’s third-quarter sales in China soared 15.2 percent from a year earlier. Global sales in 14 countries outside the US rose 9.3 percent in the same period, while US sales rose 1.4 percent.
Wal-Mart is the latest foreign retailer seeking to tap the fast-growing e-commerce market in China. Internet sales in the country, the world’s biggest Web market with more than 420 million users, soared 60 percent year-on-year in the first half of this year to 2.25 trillion yuan (US$340 billion), state media said in August.
Underlining the growing appeal of the country’s Internet market, sportswear giant Adidas has opened a flagship online store on Taobao. Clothing retailer Gap has also opened an e-store along with its first outlets in the country.
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
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