All time high as at 17/2/14 : 1275
Yesterday: 1292
Today’s high: 1304
Latest news courtesy Bloomberg today @10:33
Tencent Holdings Ltd. (700) bought a 20 percent stake in the owner of China’s Dianping.com, a Yelp-like website, as Asia’s largest Internet company boosts location-based services.
Huai River Investment Ltd., a wholly owned unit of Tencent, will buy new shares in Dianping Holdings Ltd., according to a Hong Kong exchange filing today. Tencent may invest as much as $500 million in Dianping, Sina.com reported Feb. 17 without saying where it got the information.
The acquisition will let Tencent tap into Dianping’s nearly 100 million monthly active users who access the website’s reviews and discounts for food and entertainment. Shenzhen, China-based Tencent is competing with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to offer location-based shopping and entertainment services in a market where more than 500 million users accessed the Internet from mobile phones last year.
Dianping.com is China’s largest website for location-based food and entertainment services similar to those of Yelp Inc. (YELP) and Groupon Inc. (GRPN)
The company, backed by Sequoia Capital Operations LLC and Lightspeed Venture Partners, was founded in 2003 in Shanghai and offers local business-search services that include consumer-generated reviews.