China's Taobao and Yahoo! Japan unveil retail partnership

SHANGHAI: Taobao, China's largest retail website, and Yahoo! Japan on Monday announced new online platforms that will allow merchants on their respective sites to sell products in both markets.

Under the partnership, Yahoo! Japan merchants will list around eight million items in a special Chinese-language TaoJapan section, giving them access to more than 190 million Taobao users, the companies said.

Online stores at Taobao will be able to offer about 50 million products from China to Japanese consumers at Yahoo! Japan's China Mall, they said in a statement.

The new services, available from June 1, will allow Internet users in both countries to buy and sell using systems and procedures that are familiar to them in their native languages, it said.

"We expect that the Asian economy will continue to grow further, led mainly by China and Japan, and that the Internet business and e-commerce business will be the core of that growth," said Masayoshi Son, chief executive of SoftBank, Yahoo! Japan's biggest shareholder with a 41 percent stake.

Taobao is a unit of China's largest e-commerce company Alibaba Group, in which both SoftBank and US Internet companies Yahoo! are shareholders.

Alibaba Group's Hong Kong-listed subsidiary Alibaba.com already has a joint venture with SoftBank called Alibaba.com Japan.

Online shopping in China, home to the world's largest online population, has boomed in recent years, as the nation's more than 400 million Internet users become increasingly web-savvy.

Transaction volume on Taobao exceeded 200 billion yuan (29 billion dollars) in 2009.