China B2B hotel booking site raises $17m

Established in 2013, Haoqiao.cn started out as a B2C operator for international hotel bookings. It shifted to a B2B model after few months, having found the cost of building up online traffic was too high. The platform now connects international hotel suppliers with onlien and offline travel agencies in China, allowing registered corporate users to book rooms online at standard wholesale prices.

The company facilitated RMB900 million worth of transactions last year by connecting 200 hotel suppliers and 6,500 travel agencies. The previous year, when it had only 30 suppliers and 1,500 travel agencies, revenue came to RMB180 million.

IDG Capital Partners invested in Haoqiao.cn across two rounds of funding between 2013 and 2014. One year later, the start-up dismantled its variable interest entity (VIE) structure in order to list domestically. In October 2015, it raised RMB60 million in a Series B round from domestic GP Shunxi Capital.

With the new funding, Haoqiao will make improvements to its technology and existing hotel information system as well as recruit and train new staff, the company told Tencent QQ News.

The National SME Development Fund was launched by the Ministry of Industry & Information Technology in 2015, with a target of RMB6 billion. It aims to support small- and medium-sized enterprises in China. The Ministry of Finance contributed RMB1.6 billion to the fund, while the remainder was raised from the Shenzhen government, financial institutions and private investors.

Founded in 2012, China Merchants Capital is an investment arm of China Merchants Group. As of year-end 2016, the unit had total assets of RMB240 billion.

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