Wanda Group Acquires Controlling Stake in 99Bill

29.12.2014 Wanda Group signed a strategic cooperation investment agreement to acquire a controlling stake of online payment platform 99Bill in Beijing on December 26. It is Wanda's first merger in the Internet finance arena and gives the company control of an important payment platform to advance its e-commerce and finance related businesses. 
99 Bill is a leading company focused on providing online payment platform services to facilitate online transactions in China. According to a report published in 2014 by Enfodesk, 99bill ranked fourth behind Unionpay, Alipay and Tenpay in total online transactions respectively. 99bill has the most complete range of licenses of any third party payment company in China; providing offline, online, mobile, cross-border and other complete solutions and value added services for industries such as retail, insurance, travel and e-commerce. The company completed 2 trillion yuan worth of transactions in 2014, directly cooperated with over 200 organizations and has 3.6 million corporate strategic partners. 99bill will continue to be run independently following the merger, with Mr. Guan Guoguang continuing on as Chairman and CEO to focus on pushing the company's payment 2.0 strategy to increase its market share domestically.
99Bill will become the future payment platform for Wanda's O2O focused e-commerce business, with Wanda being able to leverage on its large consumer network to build its own big data infrastructure. Wanda Group has the world's largest offline consumer network, with 1.5 billion people walking through its Wanda Plaza's in 2014 and 6 billion expected by 2020. All of Wanda subsidiaries will use 99Bill, with incentives being given to retailers and conumers to use the platform. The partnership is poised to increase 99Bill's total transaction revenue by hundreds of billions.
The acquisition has strategic significance for Wanda Group’s development in the finance arena. 99Bill will form the base of Wanda’s financial business, which aims to develop a complete internet finance ecosystem. If Wanda can take advantage of 99Pay’s 3.6 million corporate strategic partners, 200 financial institutions and integrate these with its own partners and Wanda Plaza customer network, it will become China’s largest O2O company.