JD Capital-invested Baihe Builds a Dating Ecosystem with New Brand Strategy
2017-04-21
Baihe.com held a press conference on its brand strategy on April 20, signaling a faster pace in building a dating ecosystem. Tian Fanjiang, president of Baihe, said at the conference that the company will upgrade its strategy and shift from merely handling dating to constructing an ecosystem connected with family. Through M&As, Baihe will accelerate business layout in dating, wedding ceremony, relationship counseling, marital property, and internet finance.
Also at the conference, Baihe announced the joint establishment with JD Capital of a RMB 200 million dating investment fund, which will be used to invest in, merge or purchase enterprises engaged in wedding services or the dating industry in general. The fund also allows JD Capital to work with Baihe in integrating resources across the dating industrial chain and building the latter into a bellwether.
In May 2016, Beihe.com merged with Jiayuan.com (another famous dating website) through Tianjin Xingfu Shidai Enterprise Management Co., Ltd., a stakeholder of Baihe.com. The marriage between the two made them an absolute industrial leader with a combined market presence of nearly 50%. While giving Baihe.com a big leap in horizontal expansion, the merger has also brought it to hit the growth ceiling. It is under such circumstances that Baihe.com chooses to jointly launch a M&A fund with JD Capital, so as to continue its growth by expanding downstream businesses, and thus upgrading Baihe.com from a dating website to an enterprise boasting a full range of services for dating and wedding.
The dating and wedding market holds perfect opportunities for M&A. As an upstream industrial leader, Baihe.com boasts massive internet traffic. Also, by diversifying its service lines from just matchmaking, Baihe.com greatly expanded its customer life cycle, giving it great potential for long-term profiting. All these have made Baihe.com the optimal partner of JD Capital in its endeavor to integrate the dating and wedding market.
In 2017, JD Capital initiated the “Bellwether Emerging Plan”, which aims at assisting enterprises in M&As through integrated investment. By conducting M&As with other enterprises, one would be able to increase market share and comprehensive competitiveness, achieve both endogenous and exogenous growth, and create greater scale effects. The joint fund with Baihe is another step forward for the Program. It opens a new M&A era for the dating industry, and will build the company into a flagship enterprise covering the whole industry chain. The establishment of the fund is exactly a practice and push-forward of the Plan. Jointly, we will usher in the era of dating and wedding industry integration and build a flagship enterprise across the entire industrial chain.