NO 6 Koubei.com
In 2004, Li Zhiguo, a former employee of Alibaba, established koubei.com, an e-commerce site focusing on living consumption information, and its growth rapidly reached 1 million users.
In 2006, Alibaba invested $6 million in koubei.com and bought the entire company two years later. With the help of Alibaba, koubei.com became the biggest competitor of dianping.com, a firm that offered living services online.
In 2009, koubei.com was integrated into Taobao, a strategic move that proved to be the death knell of koubei.com. Things turned out to different from what the firm had predicted. Koubei.com did not fully utilize the huge users' resource of Taobao.
In 2011, Alibaba had to spend $50 million in MeiTuan.com, the original competitor of koubei.com, to take on Tencent in online-to-offline (O2O) business.
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 A file photo taken on Oct 31, 2006 in Shaoyang, Hunan province shows the homepage of Koubei.com [Lv Jianshe/Asianewsphoto]
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| To US consumers, China's Alibaba is a non-entity |
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