Innovative e-commerce platform Jingling Group has completed a USD 100 million round of funding to enlarge its consumer base in second, third and fourth-tier cities. Social e-commerce is gaining momentum in 2019.
Another social e-commerce player refueled for battle in China's more vertical retail market.
Innovative e-commerce platform Jingling Group (鲸灵集团) has completed a USD 100 million round of funding to enlarge its consumer base in second, third and fourth-tier cities. Sky9 Capital led the investment, followed by existing investors, including Tencent, IDG Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, K2VC and Vision Capital.
The money raised will be applied in the more segmented and vertical area as a strategic upgrading, leveraging its advantage in low tier cities, live streaming services and social e-commerce. The accumulated investment has amounted to CNY 2 billion after this funding round.
Wu Qiangqiang (邬强强), CEO of Jingling, used to serve Alibaba for nine years as the CEO of Juhuasuan department (a low-tier city targeted department). The funding team members also bore a strong Alibaba and Tencent gene, making this startup bulked up substantially within two years of development.
Jingling owns a social e-commerce platform Shuaishuaibaobao (甩甩宝宝, or Shuaibao), a surrogate shopping online platform Haoyiku (好衣库) and two group buying sites Wantuan (万团联盟) and Shuaishuaituan (甩甩团).
Shuaibao made its inception in June 2018 and has operated as the social e-commerce arm of Jingling. The e-commerce platform operating on WeChat mini-program has collaborated keenly with Tencent to launch its S2B2C model, meaning the goods are transferred from supplier (brand merchants) to small businessmen (or distributor) and finally to consumers. Besides, the brand merchants provide sources of goods, logistics and after-sales service for individual small businessmen who could meet their sales requirement.
The advantages of social e-commerce are that it can shorten the supply chain, realize the explosive growth of users through fission, and open the blue-sea market of low-tier-cities users. Pinduoduo (拼多多)represents the group shopping mode, Beidian, Yunji and Jingling are in the way of exploring the S2B2C mode, Xiaohongshu (小红书) and Baobaoshu are community-based modes.
Social e-commerce has not only been favored by capital this year but also consumers. Now Shuaibao has cooperated with over 10,000 brands, attracted more than 50 million users. It also claimed a tens of millions level daily GMV to be a normal state.
Early this June, people familiar with the matter said that Jingling was preparing for initial public offering in Hong Kong. Senior executives had been frequently meeting with people in Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing. The current valuation is said to surpass CNY 10 billion.