![\"qatar_gratteciels\"](\"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/assets\/qatar_gratteciels.jpg\")
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The French e-commerce website vente-privee.com<\/a> is welcoming a sounding investor to its shareholder structure \u2013 Qatar Holding<\/a>. The investing fund is a sovereign fund from Qatar and a very prestigious name to bear as an investor given the brands it usually invests in. Such is the case of the Harrods Group, which was purchased by Qatar Holding in 2010, and also LVHM in which Qatar Holding also has a stake as a shareholder.<\/strong> Vente-Priv\u00e9e is a French e-commerce startup that sells fashion & house products at sales prices. When they started in 2001 it was quite disruptive since they created a new market for online shopping in France. Today they fulfill more than 150.000 daily orders, in roughly 1,6 billion euros in revenues last year.<\/strong><\/p>\n Jacques-Antoine Granjon<\/a>, founder of vente-privee.com, stated that this doesn\u2019t represent a new capital raise or any change in the company\u2019s capital. He stated that very recently one of its shareholders showed a potential interest selling out his stock, and this led the French entrepreneur to rethink its capital structure altogether.<\/strong> In the end, the shareholder who showed interest to leave stayed as investor, but another investor who remains unknown changed positions with Qatar Holding who is now owner of the named shares.<\/p>\n Although we don\u2019t know how much of Vente-Priv\u00e9e Qatar Holding now owns, Jacques-Antoine said that it was a very small stake \u2013 nonetheless a move that is probably smarter than the notoriety of the new shareholder, given the investment portfolio of Qatar Holding in companies such as LVHM Vente-Priv\u00e9e will now have privileged relations with such companies \u2013 a true advantage for the internet startup.<\/strong><\/p>\n For the French entrepreneur this is good news that might cheer up the staff after a French court ruled that the company\u2019s name could not be protected as intellectual propriety. The case originated in a lawsuit between Vente-Priv\u00e9e and its main competitor \u2013 Showroomprive.com<\/a>. The topic of disagreement was the supposed abusive use of Vente-Priv\u00e9e\u2019s brand name. Apparently French courts decided that no wrong had been done by Showroompriv\u00e9e since the name Vente-Priv\u00e9e denotes common words in French that cannot be appropriated by any company<\/strong> \u2013 the same way we cannot register \u201cWater\u201d as a brand, imagine if you had to pay royalties to another company to sell \u201cwater\u201d. There was a big fuss about this case although in the end Vente-Priv\u00e9e stills holds solid ground with its brand. They might be unable to register the brand as intellectual propriety, but the Competition Authority in France will recognize the notoriety of the brand if another company tries to gain from its reputation, even if its not IP protected.<\/strong><\/p>\n For those who don\u2019t know Jacques-Antoine you will find humor in the French founder, in a direct response to Amazon\u2019s project to deliver purchases through drones, and Groupon\u2019s (fake) project to deliver orders to its customers by catapult, Vente-Priv\u00e9e has announced their plans for distribution innovation: teleportation<\/a><\/strong>, hours of fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The French e-commerce website vente-privee.com is welcoming a sounding investor to its shareholder structure \u2013 Qatar Holding. The investing fund is a sovereign fund from Qatar and a very prestigious name to bear as an investor given the brands it usually invests in. Such is the case of the Harrods Group, which was purchased by<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":22545,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10563],"tags":[2592],"class_list":["post-22544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tech","tag-vente-privee"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22544\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}