China's JD.com Inc has ratcheted up competition with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd through a $1.55 billion deal with an online car sales portal, as the e-commerce giants gun for high-value markets like cars, tourism and homes. Following over a year of fervent investment activity in China's tech sector, niche e-commerce markets are now in vogue as targets, analysts say. Taking stakes in specialists like Bitauto Holdings Ltd offers an avenue into big-ticket purchases which fall outside major e-commerce companies' traditional focus of day-to-day goods.Such tie-ups also lend smaller firms some of their bigger peers' clout, directing potential customers their way from websites like those of JD.com and Alibaba."JD.com is trying to position itself as the go-to e-commerce platform, and this could be an important category expansion for them," said John Choi, a Hong Kong-based Internet analyst at Daiwa Capital Markets.JD.com's deal late last week was the company's biggest ever, with its share of the investment in Bitauto valued at $1.35 billion. Chinese social networking and video game giant Tencent Holdings Ltd, which owns 17.6 percent of JD.com, will also take a 3.3 percent stake in Bitauto.
JD.com, Inc. is a holding company. The Company is an online direct sales company. Shares of JD fell by 0.56% or $-0.14/share to $24.94. In the past year, the shares have traded as low as $19.94 and as high as $33.10. On average, 6448040 shares of JD exchange hands on a given day and today's volume is recorded at 8119814.
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