Chinese E-Commerce Site Taobao Recorded Transactions of $12 Billion

Launched in 2003 by Alibaba (Public, HKG:1688) , Taobao claims to be the largest Internet retail website in China with 78 percent of the Chinese domestic online consumer market.

Taobao recorded transaction volume (gross merchandise volume) of RMB80.9 billion (US$11.8 billion) for the first half of 2009, a 97 percent year-on-year increase. Taobao’s gross merchandise volume equated to 1.4 percent of total retail sales in China in the first half of this year, according to the Chinese Bureau of Statistics.

In July, the official Lenovo flagship online store achieved record sales of more than RMB10 million (US$1.5 million) for the month. Forty-seven percent of Taobao users are between the ages of 26-35 and 39 percent are between the ages of 16-25.

As of June 30, 2009, Taobao had nearly 145 million registered users, an increase of 101 percent year-over-year. The company said that while spending per order in the first half of this year has declined by RMB51.5 (US$7.54) compared to last year due to the economic slow-down, the overall number of orders has increased by 184 percent over last year because of growing acceptance of e-commerce among the mainstream Internet population.