By CHENG Yue, XIAO Fang
Several senior executives of the online dating site Jianyuan.com, including its CEO and CFO, have been taken away by police.
Besides the matchmaking platform, Jiayuan operates more than 200 offline stores, similar to traditional matchmaking agencies. In December last year, it was revealed that the company illegally acquired registered members’ private information such as browsing history and chat records.
Founded in 2003, Jiayuan.com is one of the earliest and largest online dating platforms in China. As of 2016, the number of its registered users has reached 170 million. Jiayuan.com’s revenue accounts for 27.6 percent of the entire online dating and dating market in China.
In 2015, Jiayuan.com and Baihe.com, the two of the largest matchmaking websites, merged to create Baihe Jiayuan. Fosun purchased a 69 percent stake in the merged company in 2018. After Jiayuan was acquired by Fosun, it became part of the company’s Happy Ecology sector. From 2020 to 2021, the sector continued to lose money, of which the loss in 2021 was 594 million yuan (US$88 million).
