Online services pioneer enters the big league

Zhubajie and Witmart hit pay dirt by doing for creative services what Alibaba did in bringing together e-commerce buyers and sellers

When a Chinese restaurant owner in California's Silicon Valley needs a logo or a menu design, he or she will probably log in to Zhubajie.com, China's largest platform for online creative services.

After eight years of losses, Zhubajie is expected to turn profitable this year. Its current worth is estimated to be more than 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion; 1.4 billion euros). By the end of 2015, Zhubajie had about 15 million registered users and the annual turnover was 7.5 billion yuan.
"Every 10 minutes, there is a proposal from overseas," says Zhu Mingyue, founder and CEO of Chongqing Zhubajie Network Technology Co, the company that operates Zhubajie.com.

Zhubajie, a major character in the Ming Dynasty (AD 1368-1644) novel Journey to the West, was supposedly reincarnated as a pig.
Its international English-language portal, Witmart.com, serves customers worldwide, including the United States, Canada and Britain. "Our services cover 25 countries and regions," says Zhu, formerly a local newspaper reporter.

The success of Alibaba, China's e-commerce giant, makes Zhu upbeat about the prospects of Zhubajie as it expands. "Compared with online goods trade, our services trade has no constraints in terms of logistics and customs. It is very promising."

The company has already set up offices in Houston in the United States and Toronto in Canada. "We are based in China and mainly serve Chinese clients, but we aim at the global market."

Zhu founded the company in 2006 in the southwestern city of Chongqing. From a small studio, it has grown into a large Internet-based platform for outsourced creative services. Service providers, typically designers and advertisers, trade with 3 million budget-minded small and medium-sized companies on Zhubajie.

Its popular services include logo design, Web design, translation, copywriting and marketing.

In September, the company launched a new business: trademark registration and other intellectual property rights protection services.

"As more and more Chinese small and medium companies go abroad and foreign ones come into China, they need a reliable and affordable service for their trademark registration," Zhu says.

In partnership with local professionals, the company can get such business done in China, the US, Canada and the European Union.

For example, to get a trademark registered in the US, the standard package of services costs $1,000 (919 euros). In case of application denial, the client can get a full refund and 25 percent compensation.

Zhubajie's innovative business model evolved throughout its nine years of existence, and today includes a free trademark search and money-back guarantee. "Now we get 1,000 orders every day and the figure is expected to reach 6,000 per day next year," Zhu says.

In June, the website announced a change to its business model and stopped collecting the 20 percent commission from each deal. It is also an incubator for startups.

The company is hoping to ride its new businesses like trademark registration, printing and financing to a revenue of 10 billion yuan this year.

That would mark a long way from the time it used to depend on venture capital for survival and growth. For instance, in 2007, the then one-year-old company received 10 million yuan from local IT company Chongqing Born Group.

In 2011, it received a $10 million investment from International Data Group Corp, a US-based technology, media, research and events management firm.

In June 2015, it got a cash injection of 2.6 billion yuan, the largest of its kind in China's services sector and the largest Internet-related investment in West China. Owing to its success on its home turf, Zhubajie gave up its plan to list on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The June 2015 funding, however, has sped up its plans for a local float.