JD.com Acquired for $5 Million?

A year ago, JD.com was acquired by Jingdong, a company that bought the domain name to re-brand from 360buy. However, the price for the deal was not disclosed.

George Kirikos reported that the domain name sold for as much as $5 million:

“I was browsing through EDGAR, and noticed that JD.com’s SEC filing had a section for their balance sheet on page F-37 [of the SEC filing] that referenced domain names. As of December 31, 2011, they recorded 2,621,000 RMB for domain names, but that rose to 36,032,000 RMB as of December 31, 2012.

If you look at the WHOIS history, Alexander Lerman owned the JD.com domain name on December 31, 2011, but by the end of 2012, it was owned by the Chinese company (the actual WHOIS change took place on 2012-06-12).

Thus, one can infer that the change in the Chinese company’s balance sheet allocated to domain names between the end of 2011 and the end of 2012 was mostly due to the acquisition of the JD.com domain name. The difference between the two years of 33,411,000 RMB, using a rate of 0.15695 to the US dollar via the chart at XE.com for the exact date of June 12, 2012, would equal USD $5,243,856.

Of course, there might have been other domain name acquisitions to account for the change in the balance sheet, but I’d bet that USD $5 million is a good estimate for the transaction value of the JD.com domain name.”

Considering that Facebook paid $8,5 million for FB.com and that IG.com sold a while ago for $4,7 million, it’s not so hard to believe that JD.com changed hands for $5 million.