Twenty years ago, Zhongguancun was but farming fields and small houses, far from the city center of Beijing. The ‘cun’ at the end of Zhongguancun literally means ‘village’. As with much else in China, the change has come lightening fast.
Today, Zhongguancun is China’s closest equivalent to Silicon Valley. It’s host to electronics super malls, research centers, publicly-listed tech giants, and hundreds of startups. During my walk to work between twenty-story office towers, it’s hard to imagine this land was farmed but one short generation ago.
Here are three reasons why Zhongguancun (or the larger Haidian district) has grown into China’s top tech hub: → Read More
The future for Internet services pioneer Yahoo remains uncertain, to put it mildly.
Currently a beleaguered takeover target sans visionary CEO (although one could argue recently fired Carl Bartz never served that role either), Asian e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba Group is apparently going to great lengths to re-acquire the stake Yahoo has in the company. → Read More
Alibaba.com, the massive B2B e-commerce company based in China, this morning published (PDF) its results for the third quarter of the year. The company reported a 11.9 percent increase (to $64 million) in its Q3 net profit, with revenues rising 10.6 percent to $250 million, year-over-year.
This was below Wall Street expectations; Alibaba blamed a weak U.S. economy, a decline in manufacturing, the eurozone debt crisis and on-going platform enhancement activities for missing analysts’ forecasts. → Read More
Today at the China 2.0 conference at Stanford, Alibaba Groups’s Jack Ma replied to a pointed question about buying Yahoo with, “We are very interested in Yahoo. Our Alibaba group is important to Yahoo and Yahoo is important to us … All the serious buyers interested in Yahoo have talked to us.”
Those “serious buyers” most likely include Alibaba Group investor Silver Lake Partners, Microsoft and Andreesen Horowitz, who have all reportedly reached out to Yahoo’s board.
→ Read More
Alibaba-owned Vendio has acquired SingleFeed, a startup that helps online merchants to submit, manage, and optimize product listings on sites like Google Product Search, PriceGrabber and others. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
SingleFeed takes an online merchant’s products and delivers this data to comparison shopping engines. The virtue of SingleFeed’s service is that it helps merchants improve engagement, visits and transactions by being listed on more engines. As Vendio says, comparison shopping engines can drive between 15 and 40% of an online store’s monthly visits. → Read More
A fairly unnoticed story percolated through the interwebs this weekend about Alibaba’s CEO and hundreds of employees being implicated in what amounts to a payola scandal. Alibaba is a site that allows you to buy the worst junk imaginable. They represent over 500,000 factories in China. It is a sourcing site full of fake laptops, poorly made clothing, and potentially life-threatening auto parts. And, best of all, it was acting as a middleman to actual criminals. I’m reporting this as a warning. CE makers have drilled it into our heads that you can make low-priced, high quality electronics. You cannot. It is, on the aggregate, impossible. That $500 laptop bears an unseen price. → Read More
Yahoo’s CFO Tim Morse spoke at a Goldman Sachs Investing conference today and was peppered with questions about Yahoo’s Asian assets, which are the bulk of the value of its stock price right now.
On the subject of Alibaba, Morse was very conciliatory, repeatedly praising the job that the management team is doing building the business, emphasizing that Yahoo was just a financial stake-holder. He said that Yahoo was in no hurry to name it’s contractually obligated second board member.
On the subject of Yahoo Japan, there has definitely been a shift in tone when it comes to whether or not Yahoo might divest its incredibly valuable stake. Earlier this month an analyst from Pacific Crest, noted as much in a research report, raising its rating on Yahoo based on the potential for a boost from selling the Japan shares and its price target to a comparative heady $21 a share. → Read More
BizArk, a Chinese e-commerce company specialized in international trading solutions, has now made its debut and announced that it has secured ‘tens of millions of dollars’ in financing from IDG Ventures (up to $40 million according to several reports).
The press release announcing the investment is one of the strangest I’ve ever read. → Read More
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has just acquired Auctiva, a company that develops eBay auction management software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
This deal comes off of Alibaba’s recent acquisition of U.S. e-commerce company Vendio. Auctiva provides a variety of listing, marketing and management tools as well as image hosting and storefronts to sell on online marketplaces like eBay. → Read More
Editor’s note: This is a guest post penned by Michael Cole, Managing Director of RightSite.asia, China’s largest online marketplace for commercial and industrial real estate. Cole has also successfully launched, grown and profitably exited from media ventures in China.
After a modest amount of time observing China’s economy it becomes clear that the government likes to arrange organized competition in industries it considers strategic. Thus the country gets three major airlines—China Eastern, China Southern and Air China—as well as three major mobile phone networks in China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom.
Now, with the recent announcement of two major new search engine companies, it appears that search is joining transportation, phone networks and Internet service providers as a strategic industry to be managed more directly by the government. And maybe China will soon have three search giants to match up with its telephone and airline triplets. → Read More
The news this past week that Google would cease the censorship of its search results in China, and could well be forced to entirely halt operations in the country as a result, is quite simply one of the most interesting stories to come along in the tech sphere in a long time. The reality is that it’s not just a tech story; it spills into the world of international politics and beyond. And it could have wide-reaching ramifications far into the future. Did I mention there was hacking involved and potential espionage?
There are just so many angles to this story, and nearly everyone seems to have an opinion. Two of those we covered earlier in the week included Sarah’s take that Google’s actions were more about business (or a lack thereof) for the company in China. Paul, meanwhile, was quick to dampen the cheers from Silicon Valley that Google was doing the right thing, arguing they’re four years too late for this new stance to have any moral weight. Mike followed this up with a comment on the post, “The problem with un-censoring now is that it further reinforces that the decision was the wrong one from the beginning, and that they knew full well it was wrong even when they made it.” All of that rings true. But I disagree.
My position is a simple one that is twofold: it’s never too late to do the right thing. And it’s never wrong to do the right thing. → Read More
Alibaba is best known for its international B2B e-commerce and sourcing market place Alibaba.com, but also operates Taobao – the “eBay of China” and largest C2C Internet retail web site, Alimama – an online advertising exchange and affiliate network – as well as Alipay, China’s most popular third-party online payment system modelled after Paypal but offering additional features such as escrow services.
Alibaba’s chairman Jack Ma, a former English teacher, founded Alibaba in 1999 out of his Hangzhou apartment. Ten years later the company has grown to China’s second largest Internet company. At the company’s tenth anniversary celebration, the man shared his lofty goals for the Alibaba Group in the next few years. → Read More
Yahoo is about to raise approximately $150 million by selling 57.48 million Alibaba.com shares, according to a term sheet obtained by Reuters earlier on Monday. The Internet giant is selling the large chunk of shares at HK$19.80-HK$20.30 each, which represents a 4-6.4% discount to the stock’s closing price of HK$21.15 on Monday and the entire 1.14 percent stake Yahoo held in Alibaba.com, which is China’s largest B2B marketplace.
Yahoo announced a little over 4 years ago that it would purchase a 39% stake in the e-commerce giant’s parent company for US $1 billion – which it will be retaining – plus Yahoo’s Chinese assets (worth about US $700 million). Alibaba in return took charge of Yahoo! China, while Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma remained in charge of Alibaba Group. Yahoo China recently underwent a significant restructuring, during which its popular classified listings service Koubei was taken and moved to Taobao.com. → Read More
