Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten this morning announced that it is buying France’s e-commerce website operator PriceMinister for about €200 million, reports the Wall Street Journal.
The news comes less than a month after word got out that Rakuten moved to acquire US-based Buy.com for approx. the same price ($250M).
Rakuten said it will buy the entire stake in PriceMinister, which boasts some 12 million registered members, from the existing issueholders through its unit in Luxemburg. The transaction is expected to close in July.
Aside from its acquisitions of Buy.com and now PriceMinister, Rakuten is also aggressively expanding across the globe through online mall operation partnerships, including a $50 million deal it recently signed with Chinese search engine Baidu and one it has established with Indonesian media conglomerate PT Global Mediacom – Rakuten and Global Mediacom are poised to launch a local e-commerce network through a joint-venture in the second half of 2010.
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