According to George Kirikos, the domain name JD.com sold for an estimated $5 million in 2012. Mr. Kirikos was browsing through EDGAR, and was able to discover that their SEC filing referenced domain names. Looking at the recorded public data, he was able to concur that the amount paid for domain names rose from 2.6 million RMB to 36 million RMB as of December 2012.
Here’s what Mr. Kirikos told me:
“I was browsing through EDGAR, and noticed that JD.com’s SEC filing had a section for their balance sheet on page F-37 of:
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1549802/000104746914000443/a2218025zf-1.htm
that referenced domain names. As of December 31, 2011, they recorded 2,621,000 RMB for domain names, but that rose to 36,032,000 RMB as of December 31, 2012.”
According to the whois history, Alexander Lerman owned the JD.com domain name on December 31, 2011, but by the end of 2012, it was owned by the Chinese company (the actual WHOIS change took place on 2012-06-12).
Mr. Kirikos then told me that “one can infer that the change in the Chinese company’s balance sheet allocated to domain names between the end of 2011 and the end of 2012 was mostly due to the acquisition of the JD.com domain name. The difference between the two years of 33,411,000 RMB, using a rate of 0.15695 to the US dollar via the chart at:
http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?fr…to=USD&view=5Y
for the exact date of June 12, 2012, would equal USD $5,243,856.
I haven’t looked specifically to see which additional domain names were purchased by the company during that period, but it’s probably a safe bet to say that they purchased the JD.com domain name for several million dollars. Keep in mind, though, that in the filing, they say that they owned 1611 domain names as of December 31, 2013:
December 31, 2013, we had 9 patents granted in China, 187 patent applications pending in China and 10 patent applications pending outside China. As of December 31, 2013, we had registered approximately 1,611 domain names, including jd.com, m.jd.com, 360buy.com, 360buy.com.cn and 360buy.cn, among others.
By the way, m.jd.com is a submdomain, and not simply a “domain name”.
More info over on Elliot’s blog, Domain Investing.
