al Chinese financial search platform Rong360.com received USD 30 million in its second round of financing recently.
Ye Daqing, CEO of it, said in an interview on August 2 that it had completed its second round of financing and the investors mainly included Sequoia Capital China. It received USD 7 million in the first round of financing about one and a half years ago and the investors mainly included Lightspeed Venture Partners.
In line with industry observers, private equity and venture capital firms will attach more importance to the Chinese Internet financial industry as an interest rate marketization reform is advanced. The business mode of Rong360.com is similar to that of Chinese travel search engine Qunar.com as based on traffic and information, both of them build themselves into a vertical search engine. In addition, they need to invest in a large scale in the initial growth period and convenience & efficiency of the Internet may be their core competitiveness. Notably, Zhuang Chenchao, founder and CEO of Qunar.com, has bought into Rong360.com.
Available information shows that established in October 2011 in Beijing, Rong360.com has had business in 32 cities across the market. So far, it has entered into a partnerships with not only the top five state Chinese commercial lenders including Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC, SHSE: 601398, and SEHK: 1398) and Bank of China (BoC, SEHK: 3988 and SHSE: 601988) but also a list of national joint-stock commercial banks including China Merchants Bank (CMB, SHSE: 600036 and SEHK: 3968) and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (SPD Bank and SHSE: 600000). And currently, it sees users apply for over CNY 10 billion loans online each month.
Ye reiterated that as a quick channel to gain users, it witnessed profit be mainly from revenue from cooperated upstream financial institutions. It has three major charging modes currently and the first one was that it gained CNY 50 to CNY 200 from a bank as long as a user of it submitted a loan application to the bank. The second one was that provided that the user gained the loan successfully, it would share part of the loan. And the third one was that it gained revenue from advertising and the contribution to the total stood at less than five percent currently.
Sequoia Capital injected USD 25 million into Ppdai.com, a Shanghai-based online P2P loaning platform, at the end of last year and established in August 2007, the pure credit-based and non-guarantee loan platform supports online business mode only currently.
