Gmarket Inc. ADR (Nasdaq: GMKT), for the second day, continued its upward explosion on the markets. After opening the day at 23.95 the stock soared upward to reach to a new 52 week high of 27.75 which is up 18.24% on the day. This is great news for Yahoo who has a large stake in Gmarket. Some have been speculating that if Yahoo is going to make an online auction/retail push in North America it will be through the Gmarket name. As well, Gmarket looks like it will be able to take a large portion of the Chinese and Japanese markets if/when they expand their operations.
As I was saying yesterday, the increase in Gmarket is being based on news that eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) is not doing particularly well in the Asian markets. There has been news about a joint venture with Tom Online (Nasdaq: TOMO) to be 51% controlled by Tom and 49% controlled by eBay. The name for this new joint venture is going to be TOM Eachnet. Tom was up big-time yesterday but is falling back down today 3.94% today. I am wondering how this joint venture will affect Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) as it was reported before that Baidu would provide text-based search advertising on Eachnet. That deal was previously struck by eBay and I wonder if it will carry forward to the new joint venture. Baidu is up 1.6% today to 118.98. I am expecting that Gmarket will drop before the day is done!
Friday Update: Looks like a lot of profit taking going on; who would have guessed it! I’m sure after all these up and downs, the stock will stabilize and should be continue to increase at a more steady but slower rate.