//

Tujia raised US$300 million in financing last year and is valued at US$1 billion

Luo Jun, founder and CEO of the vacation home rental website Tujia, announced on Wednesday that it would acquire Mayi Duanzu or “Ant Short-Term Rental”, an accommodation platform targeting families traveling within China. By acquiring the subsidiary that used to belong to 58 Ganji, China’s largest classified ad platform, Tujia now possesses 58 Ganji as a new shareholder.

“In the future, Mayi Duanzu and Tujia will continue to be run independently, with its CEO directly reporting to me,” said Luo.

Though often coined as “the Airbnb of China”, Tujia differs from Airbnb in that it does not exactly connect property owners with travellers. Instead, it manages properties listed on their website and cooperates with Chinese real estate developers to rent out unsold inventory.

Also Read: Top Airbnb clone scripts in India

Founded in 2011, Luo defines the model of Tujia as “O2O + B2C”, i.e. “online-to-offline plus business-to-customer”. The company has started trailing on the model of customer-to-customer (C2C) since this year, as it announced at a press conference this March that it was recruiting individual property owners worldwide. The efforts are expected to be enhanced with the acquisition of Mayi, whose major focus is on C2C.

Tujia raised US$300 million in financing last year and is valued at US$1 billion. By joining hands with Tujia, Mayi can utilize Tujia’s resources to gather more property listings, cover more cities, and raise its brand awareness, thereby gaining a better stance to confront the already strong competitors in the field such as Airbnb China, Onehome, and Muniao.

While Tujia has over 410,000 properties available online, more than 800,000 properties in stock, and a coverage of 329 domestic cities and 1,085 overseas destinations, Mayi Duanzu has over 300,000 properties and a coverage of more than 300 cities in China.

According to the leading statistics portal Statista, China had an online travel booking market revenue of US$17.67 billion in 2015, while that of the US was US$58.46 billion.

—

Ke Jin is a writer at AllChinaTech. She graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a Master’s Degree in English and has worked on projects with Ipsos MORI and SDI Media. She’s particularly intrigued by China’s thriving technology scene and is eager to write about this flourishing industry. Feel free to email her at kim@allchinatech.com should you have any questions 🙂

The article Tujia, China’s Airbnb, expands with an acquisition first appeared on AllChinaTech.

Image Credit: Thong Vo on Unsplash

The post Tujia, China’s Airbnb, expands with an acquisition appeared first on e27.

from e27 http://ift.tt/28R6q2h