Chinese tech giant Alibaba on Tuesday confirmed the acquisition of Android app store Wandoujia at a price of USD 200 million, which was spanned as rumor for some time.
Wandoujia made an announcement on Tuesday afternoon confirming the acquisition.
The 100% buyout at USD 200 million is a huge discount, considering that Alibaba was previously rumored to be buying Wandoujia for a price of USD 1.5 billion, back in June 2014. Alibaba plans to incorporate Wandoujia to its mobile internet unit.
Wandoujia was founded in Beijing in December 2014. Wandoujia lists various apps. Users can also input into Wandoujia the content they are interested in, including games, videos and e-books, and it will recommend different apps to the users accordingly.
Wandoujia landed USD 120 million in Series B financing from investors including Softbank, DCM and Innovation Works Development Fund in 2014. It was then invested in by Goldman Sachs in 2014.
According to an April report by the research company BigData-Research, Wandoujia ranked fourth at 7.1% in terms of market share in China in Q1 2016, following Baidu’s 31.6%, Tencent’s 23.6% and Qihoo’s 22.2%.
Baidu acquired app distribution platform 91 Wireless from Chinese games developer Netdragon at USD 1.9 billion in 2013.
(Top photo from pixabay.com)
