Weeks after announcing the purchase of a Taiwan Internet auction company, United States-based eBay.com will pay US$30 million in cash for a third of Shanghai's Eachnet.com.
Eachnet, founded in 1999, claims 3.5 million registered users and one successful auction completed every 60 seconds.
Though many of the company's rivals have closed over the past 1.5 years, a few remain, including coolbid.com.cn, ebid.com .cn and Yabuy.
The agreement with eBay includes an option for the company to raise its stake in Eachnet, though Eachnet vice-president Grace Wu said further details such as the time-line for such investments would not be revealed until the formal announcement in Beijing next week.
Before the eBay investment, Eachnet had raised US$26.5 million in venture capital financing, helped largely by the glamour value of co-founders Yibo Shao and Haiyin Tan, who met while studying at Harvard Business School.
The last round, US$20.5 million raised in late 2000, was one of the last large foreign investments in China's Internet sector and followed a summer when Eachnet announced acquisitions of several of its smaller rivals.