Dianping can leverage Tencent's extensive user-base from platforms such as QQ, to penetrate lower cities. Zheng Shuai / China Daily

Tencent Holdings Ltd, China's largest Internet firm by market value, has taken a minority stake in a local rating platform website, in a bid to use its online dominance in offline businesses.

The investment would give Tencent a 20 percent stake in Shanghai-based dianping.com, the country's most-recognized ratings and reviews site, according to a media briefing on Wednesday.

The tie-up is aimed at fostering the "leading online-to-offline ecosystem in China", leveraging dianping's high quality offline merchant network and Tencent's social communications platforms such as WeChat and QQ, according to a statement from Tencent.

The partnership underscores the company's "open platform strategy" by collaborating with vertical category leaders and promoting better services via mobile devices, said Martin Lau, president of Tencent.

"Mobile Internet has profoundly changed local life and the O2O (online-to-offline) market. Cooperating with Tencent will help us provide a better user-experience and merchant-service capability, accelerating our national expansion, especially in third-and fourth-tier cities," said Zhang Tao, chief executive officer of dianping.com.

Founded in 2003, dianping positions its business model as a mixture of Yelp Inc and Groupon Inc, which offer both restaurant reviews and group-buying services, across 2,300 cities in China.

It boasts 90 million monthly active users and generated more than 30 million reviews by the end of 2013, according to company data.

The firm has sought to go public since 2007 after receiving $4 million in venture capital from Google Inc. It has so far garnered private equity totaling $165 million.

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