Rocket internet mulling shutdown of China operations

International ecommerce cloning giant Rocket Internet is reportedly on the verge of shutting down its operations in China.

According to The Next Web, the company is desperately seeking new investors in the country and will be forced to shut down its operations there if it fails to find any. If it does so, it will mean that around 60 jobs will be on the line.

The tech news site reckons that Rocket’s various businesses in the Hong Kong-China region will continue operating. These operations include Square clone Payleven, the Airbnb-style Wimdu and the Zappos-esque Zalora.

Andreas Winiarski, Head of PR Rocket Internet told The Next Web that the company wasn’t focusing on China but avoided outright saying that the company was in trouble in the region:

”China is currently not a focus market from a company building perspective, but the existing ventures remain operating. What we have done in the past 2 weeks is to relocate a PHP dev center from China to Porto, where we already operate a big hub.”

The company certainly isn’t in trouble across the rest of South East Asia. After all, it has presences in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, and Vietnam.

Rocket Internet lays claim a global ecommerce empire. In April, GigaOM estimated that it owned some 38 companies across 58 countries. With launches in countries as diverse as Cambodia and Nigeria, that number will have only grown in the past few months.