Breaking: DeNA, Japanese Leading Mobile Social Networks Buying Chinese Tianxia

By Gang Lu on July 3, 2009 · Filed Under China Web2, Japan

In this post our editor published a month ago, we were asking DeNA: What does an advanced Japanese mobile commerce and entertainment provider do in China? Despite Wang Yong, CEO of DeNA China was telling us:

We (DeNA) will not be able to copy our success. We are here to meet friends and share insights. This market is very different so we need new ideas for China.

Today, we obviously have the answer: DeNA, the biggest mobile social network in Japan and currently has 632 employees with a market cap of USD1.5 billion, has entered a tentative (not final) agreement to take a majority stake in WapTX, the owner company of the leading mobile SNS Tianxia (天下网) in China.

Tianxia, the leading Chinese mobile SNS is reported over 30million registered users and 1million active users daily. DeNA has around 14.2 million users in Japan and 18 billion page views per month. It sounds like a win-win deal. Also note that Tianxia was invested by Infinity Venture which is from Japan, this deal is not that surprising, I guess.

Another giant from Japan Mixi has its office set up for quite a while, but its Chinese version still keeps very low key. Mixi is facing a very tough market in China, Social Networking. But for DeNA, the story might be different since the Chinese mobile market just reborn because of 3G and Japan has very advanced mobile industry and loads of experience in running a mobile service.

Welcome, DeNA! We are looking forwards to some fresh ideas from Japan mobile web.

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