Peter Treadway

Online Auction Market in China: eBay/EachNet vs. Yahoo!/TaoBao

I think that you left out one significant player - Tencent. The company launched its c2c auction site in 2H05. While it remains to be seen whether or not they can penetrate this market, I would think they should be watched closely given their ability to launch new products and cross promote them to their IM community of over 200mm active users.

A few examples of sucessful Tencent launches:

In Q305, Tencent launched its first MMORPG game. Within weeks of starting its beta trial, its peak concurrent user number topped 600K.

In Q205, Tencent launched a myspace type product. By Q106, they had 22mm users.

In 2004 they launched both their game portal and their internet portal, qq.com. In Q405, the game portal overtook Shanda's as the leading causual game portal in China.

Just recently, Alexa announced that qq.com traffic passed Sina. While the accuracy of Alexa data remains dubious, there is little doubt that qq.com continues to gain ground on the major portals.