The 7.5 billion yuan sale of Dangdang.com has been settled, and Tianhai Investment of HNA is the takeover.
On the evening of April 11, Tianhai Investment announced that the initial price of 7.5 billion yuan was to acquire 100% equity of Dangdang Kewen and 100% equity of Beijing Dangdang. This fund was issued by Tianhai Investment at a price of 6.23 yuan per share. 4.06 billion yuan, plus 3.44 billion yuan in cash.
This transaction will not lead to a change in the control of Dangdang related companies. After the transaction is completed, Dangdang Chairman Yu Yu and CEO Li Guoqing will directly hold a total of 16.49% of the company's shares.
In fact, in October last year, Reuters reported that HNA planned to acquire more than 90% of Dangdang at a valuation of US$1.2 billion to US$1.5 billion. But now, based on the acquisition price announced by Dangdang.com, the valuation has dropped.
Tianhai Investment is a cloud service platform under HNA, providing industrial cloud solutions for aviation, finance, retail, logistics and other fields, mining application scenarios of artificial intelligence and providing big data services.
After the acquisition of Dangdang, Tianhai Investment announced that it will carry out industrial integration of the entire industry chain with it, and conduct business synergy in IT product distribution business, warehousing and logistics business, Internet financial business, cloud market and cloud computing. In particular, Dangdang's e-commerce business can be used as a layout for the diversified development of Tianhai's investment business.
So far, Dangdang, which was once called "China's Amazon" in its glory days, ended its journey of independence.
19 years ago, Dangdang, which started by selling books, was one of the earliest e-commerce companies in China. Thanks to the founder's accumulation in the book and publishing industry and the emergence of e-commerce outlets, Dangdang has grown rapidly, and its business has also expanded from book products to various comprehensive categories. In 2005, Dangdang ranked second with annual sales of 440 million, second only to Taobao, while Jingdong Mall had only 30 million sales at that time.
Taking advantage of the wind of prosperity, Dangdang was listed in the United States in 2010, with the aura of "China's first B2C online mall listed in the United States", the stock price rose by 86% on the same day, obtained a high price-earnings ratio of 103 times, and raised 313 million US dollars. But Dangdang also concentrated its main force on books for profit because of its listing, limiting its own path.
In 2010, the "B2C era" was officially opened, with the rise of various e-commerce companies, and the former follower JD.com entered Dangdang's book territory, and was ready to use a 5-year price war with Dangdang to "consume", which made Dangdang's main business income and profit both. severely affected. After listing, Dangdang has been losing money for 4 consecutive years. In the past few years, JD.com and Alibaba have both listed in the United States. 91.2 billion yuan, JD.com is also far behind Dangdang.
Despite several changes and 14 months, in September 2016, Dangdang announced the completion of the privatization transaction and delisted, but at that time the company's market value had dropped to $556 million, less than a quarter of what it was when it was listed. At that time, chairman Yu Yu said in an internal letter that the company's market value did not reflect its value. According to Li Guoqing's statement earlier, Dangdang "$1 billion is the bottom line for acquisitions."
After the privatization, the rumors about Dangdang being acquired have not stopped. At the same time, Dangdang developed an offline brick-and-mortar bookstore, and even started a film business to save itself, but it was still sold.
Compared with the price of privatization, the current purchase price is doubled. No matter what happens to Dangdang in the future, it may be difficult to change its fate away from the mainstream status of e-commerce.