You can buy and sell just about anything on Taobao, China's turbo-sized answer to eBay, which links small traders with hundreds of millions of online shoppers. In my case that means printer paper, green tea and cat food. For a frustrated businessman in Beijing, however, Taobao offered a window into another kind of market: capital. Shoppers were given the rare opportunity to buy stock in a video content producer, Makev, at just under $20 per 100 shares. Over-the-counter briefly became over-the-ether, until Taobao pulled the plug Monday on Makev's site, citing rules forbidding stock sales. Zhu Jiang, the company's principal, called his online offering a practical solution to a credit crunch on startups in China. "For startups, time is life," he wrote on his microblog.
Reported by Forbes.com 5 hours ago.
↧