Tencent buys into Groupon’s secret sauce
Posted on by Jason Li
Tencent, the company known for its ubiquitous and domineering IM (or QQ) client in China, has partnered up with the American Groupon to launch its China branch. The resulting site is called GaoPeng 高朋 and takes on the Groupon look and feel:
As we reported back in 2006 (under our old moniker Virtual China), the internet group buying phenomenon got its start in China way before Groupon was founded. China has its own Groupon services though sometimes they are just parts of larger web portals.
Why Tencent, one of China’s tech giants, is partnering with Groupon, an American rendition of a Chinese concept is beyond me. Any takers? No one on Quora seems to know what the partnership terms are.