Baidu, Inc., the leading Chinese language Internet search provider, and Rakuten, Inc., the largest e-commerce website in Japan, today announced an agreement to jointly invest US$50 million over three years in a joint venture to build a B2B2C online shopping mall for Chinese Internet users. B2B2C refers to an online marketplace that links and provides value-added services to both business to business and business to consumer.

The online mall will provide customers with high-quality merchandise from well-known Chinese and foreign brands as well as small and medium sized enterprises at competitive prices. Expected to go live in the second half of 2010, the mall is anticipated to be the largest online B2B2C shopping mall in China. According to the agreement, Rakuten will own 51% and Baidu will own 49% of the new joint venture.

Founded in 1997, and currently ranked 2nd in the global B2C e-commerce market, Rakuten is a pioneer in the B2C industry. The company operates Rakuten Ichiba, Japan’s leading Internet shopping mall with over 30,000 participating merchants and over 47 million items registered on its e-commerce platform. Baidu, founded in 2000, is the world’s largest Chinese language search engine. In addition to its web search platform, Baidu also hosts a range of popular community-oriented products and services, including Baidu Knows, Baidu Post-Bar, Baidu Encyclopedia, and many others.