E-COMMERCE business JD.com Inc. and Macquarie Capital have led a US$50 million round of investment into online food delivery operator Daojia, as China’s e-commerce firms increasingly look to extend their reach offline.

    Daojia, formally called Beijing Shishang Renjia Networks Technology Co., has more than a million registered users in eight cities around China and partners with around 3,000 restaurants, it said in a statement sent to Reuters yesterday.

    China’s technology firms such as IPO-bound Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Tencent Holdings Ltd. and JD.com have been looking to tap into the online-to-offline, or “O2O,” market to widen their reach with the country’s consumers.

    “We believe that O2O has excellent potential to become the future of e-commerce,” JD.com’s vice president of corporate development Bin Chang said in the statement, adding that the restaurant delivery services sector was growing fast.

    China’s fast food market is estimated to grow around 6 percent a year to hit 960.4 billion yuan (US$156 billion) by 2018, according to market research firm Euromonitor.

    Daojia’s founder and CEO Hao Sun said the firm would use the investment, the latest in a series of fund-raising drives, to boost its technology systems and to expand its reach to 20 to 30 cities around China by 2015. (SD-Agencies)