Groupon's Chinese venture goes live

Groupon, the world's largest coupon website, launched a group-buying website in China called Gaopeng.com on Feb. 28, 2011.
GaoPeng is a collaboration between Groupon and the local Tencent Collaboration Fund and Yunfeng Capital. Tencent launched QQ.com, which has instant-messenger software that reached 630 million users last September.
"The collaboration combines Groupon's global group-buying experience with Tencent's in-depth knowledge of Chinese online communities," according to Groupon's written statement.
Customers can now sign up on Gaopeng.com, but discount deals will not be offered until March.
The service will work much like Groupon's services do in the United States, with daily deals on things to do, see and eat sent out to consumers each day. GaoPeng will launch its first deals in March and cover Beijing and Shanghai, with plans to extend to other major cities in China in the coming months, according to the company.
The site advertises that discounts will be from 50 percent to 70 percent off.
GaoPeng is a word meaning a "cherished friend sitting around the table." More importantly, it's the domain name that Groupon has decided to use for its digital presence in China. Groupon.cn has already been registered by a competing company that promotes daily deals to an alleged user base of more than 7 million people.
China has the world's biggest Internet population with more than 457 million users, many of whom are willing and able to spend online.
Groupon has grown to about 50 million users across 500 cities in 40 countries in 2010.
The two-year-old company has seen phenomenal growth. It has met bankers about an initial public offering, and sources say it rebuffed a 6-billion-U.S.-dollar advance from Google.
But the competition is intensifying, with the likes of LivingSocial expanding in the same space and a plethora of websites springing up globally that specialize in deals for niche markets.
Groupon recently completed a 950-million-U.S.-dollar round of financing as it pondered an IPO, which sources have said would be one of the largest technology offerings of 2011.