San Francisco — Japan’s largest online auctioneer, Yahoo Japan Corp., and the world’s largest, eBay Inc. of the US, said Tuesday that they will tie-up their Internet auctions business that could see customers of each site bidding on and buying items listed on the other, in a deal that will give eBay, the American auction titan, another chance to woo Japanese consumers.
The two companies plan to set up a Japanese-language website by the end of March 2008, a site within Yahoo Japan enabling its auction users to bid on eBay-listed goods intended primarily for the North American market.
“The tie-up will bode well for both companies.”
Details of the link are scheduled to be disclosed later Tuesday by Lorrie Norrington, head of eBay International, and Yahoo Japan President Masahiro Inoue at a Tokyo news conference.
By March, the U.S.-listed eBay items will appear automatically alongside Japanese listings on Yahoo Japan, and then Japanese items will be listed on eBay’s site sometime next year, the Nikkei newspaper said.
“The new portal on eBay will feature Japanese comics, compact discs and other items listed through Yahoo Japan auction service.”
Shares in Yahoo Japan, owner of the nation’s biggest auction Web site, rose 3.9 percent to 56,400 yen on news of the deal.
eBay pulled out of Japan in 2002 after only two years, a rare failure for the world’s largest online auctioneer, after struggling to make inroads to a market where Yahoo Japan and Rakuten Inc. already operated well-established sites.
eBay and Yahoo Japan, which together have about 4 trillion yen ($36 billion) in annual successful bids, will first launch a Japanese-language site on which Yahoo Japan users can bid for eBay items, spokesmen from the two firms said.
The companies will introduce the site, called Sekaimon or “Gateway to the world,” at a news conference at 11 a.m. (0200 GMT) in Tokyo. The Web address is http://www.sekaimon.com.
eBay has around 83 million users, while Yahoo Japan has about 6.6 million registered members of its online auction service, the Nikkei newspaper said.
Yahoo Japan, which has more than 15 million auction items listed on any given day, will be able to offer its customers access to the world’s biggest online auction site and its 248 million registered users. “We can expect an expansion of profits through the latest accord,” Yahoo Japan said in a statement.
Yahoo Japan, which estimates it has more than half of the online auction market in Japan, is about one-third owned by Yahoo and 40 percent by the Softbank Corporation. Softbank’s shares gained 2.1 percent, to 2,665 yen.
eBay has been seeking local partners to bolster its Asian operations in the face of mounting competition.
“For eBay, the tie-up marks the company’s second attempt to crack the lucrative Japanese market after it pulled out of the country in 2002.”
Yahoo Japan said it still does not know the specific impact the tie-up is expected to have on its earnings. It left unrevised its short-term outlook, saying that it maintains its earnings forecasts for the October-December quarter.
Yahoo Japan’s auction business saw a decline in operating profit to 11.57 billion yen in the fiscal second quarter to September from 11.71 billion yen a year before and 12.03 billion yen in the first quarter, due to the maturing of the domestic online auction business.
“The deal is incrementally positive for both sides,” said Macquarie analyst Nathan Ramler. “Users have been trying to do this already, but now there is going to be a formal channel by which you can sell products from one market into another… It is hard to say who will benefit the most, as it depends on customer usage patterns. But you should see this contribute to operating profit at Yahoo Japan.”
In China, it is working on a joint venture with the TOM Group’s TOM Online to compete against Alibaba.com. In Thailand, it plans to start a joint site with a domestic partner, Sanook.
Yahoo Japan said Shop Airlines, a unit of the online sales services firm NetPrice, would manage the site, payment services, customs clearance and delivery.