Rakuten: USD 1 billion buys America's largest shopping rebate website Ebates Inc

Sina Science and technology news Beijing time, September 9 night, Japan's largest electric business Lotte announced in Tuesday, will be 1 billion U.S. dollars to buy the largest U.S. shopping rebate website Ebates Inc.

Ebates was founded in 1998 to offer discounts and rebates to customers including Amazon, Macy's and Home Depot. Mikitani Hiroshi Mikitani, co-founder and CEO of Rakuten, said the acquisition offered his company a chance to gain ebates American clients.

The deal is in line with Mikitani's plan to reduce Rakuten's reliance on the local market, although Japan's domestic business still accounts for about 90% of Rakuten's revenues, but growth prospects there have been constrained by the decline in Japan's population and the weakness of consumer spending.

Rakuten has recently conducted a series of high-profile overseas acquisitions, including a $900 million purchase of free instant messaging applications Viber, and a 315 million dollar acquisition of Canadian E-book reader maker Kobo. Through these acquisitions, Sam Mikitani Sheng is trying to transform Rakuten from a simple electric-business company into a one-stop web site like Amazon.