Background
Yu Yu was born in1965 in Chongqing, China.
渝 俞
Yu Yu was born in1965 in Chongqing, China.
Yu Yu received her bachelor degree in English literature from Beijing Foreign Studies University in 1986. She worked as an interpreter and secretary for a joint venture in Beijing, and then went to the USA to pursue graduate studies. As a starryeyed 22-year-old, Yu first enrolled at the University of Oregon, but found the courses uninteresting, so she went to New York University instead, and received her MBA degree in 1992. From there she began her adventures on Wall Street, working for five years for Tripod, a consulting firm specializing in mergers and acquisitions and providing an advisory service to corporate clients.
In the mid-1990s, while engaged in financing on Wall Street, Yu became fascinated by the monumental success of online bookstore Amazon.com. At that time she conceptualized the idea of a similar e-commerce website for China. However on returning to China she found the country had only a tiny community of internet users, and that there was no comprehensive, up-to-date database on books in print in China, an essential piece in the construction of an online bookstore. Yu was not deterred by this. As an experienced financial professional, she understood the potential for an online bookstore, and she and her partners began to build a database of books in China, a tedious undertaking that required both money and time. To finance the work, Yu looked for foreign investment partners. Boston-based International Data Group and the Luxembourg Cambridge Holding Group became the main investors, holding the majority of equity stakes in the newly formed Beijing Science and Culture Book Information Corporation. This large database, finished in three years, laid the foundation for Yu’s future online bookstore.
While the database construction was under way, the internet community in China was growing at a dizzying speed, and by late 1999 the country had over 8.9 million internet users. In that year, Yu and her husband founded Dangdang, which quickly became China’s leading online destination for retail shopping and recorded significant growth. Yu named the store for both cultural and business reasons. ‘A good company name should combine cultural cohesiveness and auspiciousness,’ she noted, ‘Dangdang can be read smoothly in any dialect’ (China Today, 2004).
While the database construction was under way, the internet community in China was growing at a dizzying speed, and by late 1999 the country had over 8.9 million internet users. In that year, Yu and her husband founded Dangdang, which quickly became China’s leading online destination for retail shopping and recorded significant growth. Yu named the store for both cultural and business reasons. ‘A good company name should combine cultural cohesiveness and auspiciousness,’ she noted, ‘Dangdang can be read smoothly in any dialect’ (China Today, 2004).
Managing an online bookstore in China was not an easy job. At the time Chinese people lacked meaningful online experience, and Yu had to change not only customers’ purchasing habits but also the employees’ attitudes. Moreover, she had to struggle with consumers’ reluctance to engage in online shopping, inhibiting credit card regulations and an ineffectual delivery system. Despite all the drawbacks, however, Dangdang’s business has grown steadily. In a few years, Dangdang became the largest Chinese internet bookstore in the world. By 2005, the company began an aggressive transition from an online bookstore to a mass merchandiser featuring everything from digital products to cosmetics. Dangdang’s success has been truly remarkable, as noted by the chief of China’s Press and Publication Administration, ‘its tremendous help in accelerating the development of China’s book industry in the new millennium makes Dangdang the bellwether for China’s e-commerce’ (Ibid.).