Tootoo dances off stage

I'm not sure what possesses perfectly good Chinese B2B online sites to choose names which sound completely half-witted in English, but quite a few of them have. Ninetowns is an interesting business with various arrows in its quiver. The completely daft-sounding tootoo.com is not going to be one any longer according to this PR Newswire press release.

Competing with the market leaders such as Alibaba, Global Sources and made-in-china.com is not, of course, easy. Our most recent ranking of B2B media sites in the region showed that tootoo.com had slipped a further two places from 18 in February to 20 in March.

This sentence in the press release is very telling: "the discontinuation of the B2B business is not expected to have a material financial impact on Ninetowns' other business solutions". Ouch! Nice idea, but not much in the way of revenues.

Another one bites the dust.