Baidu spins Youa.com off using venture capital funding

China’s most popular search engine, Baidu.com Inc (NAQ:BIDU), has spun off Youa.com, its e-commerce platform. Qiming Venture Partners and IDG-ACCEL have already given the new company millions of dollars in venture capital funding but Baidu declined to reveal the figures.

Speaking with the Global Times on Wednesday, Baidu’s director of international communications Kaiser Kuo said that the new company was aiming at becoming a one-stop shop for its users and will mainly focus on providing life services.

Baidu’s e-commerce division general manager Cai Hu will be CEO of the new company. It is said that Youa would focus on training, food, infant products, ticketing services as well as the healthcare sector. This is a narrower focus than it has previously had, but cover the sectors in which Youa has had relative success.

The Youa platform was launched by Baidu three years ago and was focusing on the C2C e-commerce market.

However, fierce competition from its arch rivals including dangdang.com (NYSE:DANG) and taobao.com forced Youa to halt its C2C business in April this year. Dangdang is seen as the Chinese version of Amazon selling over 1 million lines of books, music and general merchandise items. Taobao is the Chinese version of eBay and is part of Alibaba Group (HKG:1688).

An e-commerce industry analyst working with Analysys International, a firm that deals with internet research speaking to the Global times Wednesday last week said that Baidu’s lack of experience in managing vendors was making it hard for the company to compete with  other platforms like Taobao,adding that the company was still new in the e-commerce sector.