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"From the looks of it,\u00A0Rocket Internet, the perennial clone producer from the Samwer brothers, may be in trouble overseas. On the heels of reports last week\u00A0that the self-described startup accelerator might be closing in Turkey, we've heard from a reliable source that the company's China operations could be on the brink as well.\r\n\r\n[Updated with response from Rocket Internet below]\r\n\r\nAccording to the tipster, Rocket Internet is urgently looking for new investors and will pull out of the market if it cannot find any. The China operation is believed to have a headcount of around 60 people, all of whose jobs are presumably on the line.\r\n\r\nRocket's\u00A0Hong Kong - China ventures, including Square clone Payleven, Airbnb copycat Wimdu\u00A0and the Zappos-inspired\u00A0Zalora, are expected to continue to operate in the region.\r\n\r\nRocket Internet was heavily involved with Groupon's messy entry into China. Filings uncovered by Digicha\u00A0last year revealed that Rocket Asia, a subsidiary of Rocket Internet, sold 9 percent of its stake in Gaopeng, the domestic joint venture that also involved local Internet giant Tencent, to Groupon for $45 million. That would have valued the company at $500 million, an impressive figure, given that it had posted $46 million in losses during the first three quarters of 2011.\r\n\r\nGaopeng went on to merge\u00A0with rival group-buying service FTuan, which was also backed by Tencent, earlier this year.\r\n\r\nThe Samwer brothers have been making rapid plays\u00A0in Southeast Asia. Within months of landing on the ground in Indonesia, Rocket Internet had hired hundreds\u00A0of employees\u00A0and released several products into the market. A steady stream of Rocket-backed clones have been been entering Asia, including Zalora, an Amazon clone called Lazada\u00A0and Pinspire,\u00A0an obvious Pinterest ripoff.\r\n\r\nThough the Samwer brothers have made plenty of enemies the world over, they've also built up some friends in Asia. Assuming that Rocket Internet's China division is indeed looking for investors to keep it running, it will be interesting to see if any of those friends put their money where their mouth is.\r\n\r\nUpdate:\u00A0&amp;quot;China is currently not a focus market from a company building perspective, but the existing ventures remain operating. What we have done in the past 2 weeks is to relocate a PHP dev center from China to Porto, where we already operate a big hub,&amp;quot; said\u00A0Andreas Winiarski, Head of PR Rocket Internet.\r\n\r\nImage via Flickr / Jurvetson"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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