Qihoo 360 invested $400 million in a joint venture with Coolpad

On December 17th of 2014, China’s largest Internet security enterprise Qihoo 360 announced a strategic cooperation with smartphone vendor Coolpad. Qihoo 360 will invest $409.05 million and set up a joint venture company with Coolpad, in which it will own 45% of the shares.

The joint venture will be focused on mobile smart devices, and launch the Dazen brand smartphones with the Internet as main channel, finally it will build a powerful mobile ecosystem. Dazen is aimed at young people, who are the mainstream population of mobile Internet. In the current situation, judged by the total number of devices sold by the Internet, Dazen is in the third place of domestic brands.

The joint venture will take advantage of Coolpad’s rich experience and patent advantage in smartphone design, manufacturing, supply chain management and after-sales service, combined with the powerful capacity in App development and online marketing of 360, the Dazen will be built into a leading Internet smartphone brand.

After the cooperation with Coolpad, 360 will provide mobile services including mobile security, mobile App store, mobile phone search and others.

Coolpad is a leading smartphone vendor in China, whose 4G mobile phones accounted for 13.8% of the domestic market shares. Coolpad was the first vendor that developed dual-card-two-standby mobile phones in the world, in the past 10 years, Coolpad has received more than 6000 patents in mobile phone industry.

According to the report of Zaino in November 2014, Coolpad is the largest cumulative shipments 4G smartphone provider in China.