Renren, a US-listed Chinese language social network, has sold its minority equity stake in Nasdaq-listed travel company ELong for $72.4m. Nasdaq-listed travel reservations provider Expedia bought Renren’s holding for $23 per share. Joseph Chen, executive chairman of Renren, said: “Our early investment in ELong helped us build mutually beneficial commercial ties as well as generate strong returns for our shareholders. “Renren and ELong will continue to work on a number of joint initiatives, including Nuomi hotel group-buy, one of the largest hotel group-buy sites in China.” In May, China-based media group Tencent and Expedia invested $125.6m in ELong. Expedia took majority ownership of eLong by buying 8% of the portfolio company for $41.2m to own 56%. Tencent, which in turn is backed by South Africa media group Naspers’ corporate venturing unit, invested $84.4m in eLong for a 16% stake. The investment in ELong represents the first significant investment in the travel market by Tencent, which set up a corporate venturing fund in January and been competing with Renren on social networking. ELong planned to form a partnership to develop online travel products and distribute eLong’s 150,000 hotel supply to Tencent’s online community of 674 million active user accounts in China.

Subscribe to go deeper

GCV subscribers get access to all our proprietary data and deep-dive articles, as well as the global directory of CVC investors.



Not sure if you have a subscription?