December 27th, 2011

A Geek’s Guide to China’s Silicon Valley

China map

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

December 8th, 2011

Report: Alibaba Seeks Up To $4 Billion In Debt Funding To Buy Back Yahoo’s Stake

alibaba

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

November 24th, 2011

Alibaba.com Grows Revenues And Profits, Misses Expectations

alibaba

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

September 30th, 2011

Buying Yahoo Is A No-Brainer For Alibaba

Screen Shot 2011-10-01 at 1.58.41 PM

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

June 28th, 2011

Alibaba's Vendio Buys SingleFeed To Help Merchants List Products On Comparison Shopping Sites

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

February 22nd, 2011

Alibaba And The Curse Of Chinese Manufacturing

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

February 16th, 2011

Is Yahoo Getting Close to Selling Its Lucrative Yahoo Japan Shares?

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

February 14th, 2011

Jack Ma Flies Thousands of Miles to Palo Alto, Still Doesn't Want to See Carol Bartz

Burn! According to sources, Alibaba Group’s CEO Jack Ma is in town and he’s not even paying a courtesy call to his estranged partners at Yahoo.

Ma was spotted dining with Taobao CEO Jonathan Luk and other Alibaba executives at Fuki Sushi in Palo Alto last night, and a spokesperson for the company confirmed they were in town for meetings. Another source close to the company, who requested anonymity, said Alibaba was here to meet with several big Silicon Valley companies about potential partnerships with Taobao– and that a meeting with Yahoo was specifically not on the agenda. → Read More

December 14th, 2010

Bartz Takes the Hint, Stays away from Alibaba's Board…for Now

Carol Bartz has been the fashionable Silicon Valley punching bag for much of 2010, and that’s no doubt escalating in private conversations in Sunnyvale today as hundreds of Yahoo employees are told they no longer have a job– just in time for Christmas!

But give her credit for one savvy move: Not naming herself to Alibaba’s board as she signaled she would earlier in the year. Or, give the board credit for telling her she wasn’t. Whoever made the decision should be applauded by Yahoo’s shareholders because it would have only made an already intractable situation worse. → Read More

October 20th, 2010

Bartz: Out of 15,000 Employees Only Three Left. Wait, What?

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was on Fox Business News today, and she was plenty Bartz-y. When Fox anchor Liz Clamen asked her repeatedly if she was on the way out, she said she was there to stay, adding “Do I look like a wimp?”

No. You do not. Even if you think Bartz is running the company into the ground, you have to give her credit for not holing up and hiding the way her predecessor Jerry Yang did, for continuing to be herself and holding her head high amid a pretty nasty storm of rumors. She further added that she wasn’t hiring a strong number two, saying she didn’t need one.

The question is, do we believe her? → Read More

September 24th, 2010

The Surprising Religion of Jack Ma

Jack Ma– CEO of The Alibaba Group and president of the Carol Bartz fan club– was on Charlie Rose this week, and while he didn’t offer any more insight into the Yahoo situation, he said a lot of interesting things.

Ma is a force. He’s going at half-normal-speed in this video. I saw him speak at the World Economic Forum last week in Chinese and the translators couldn’t keep up with him. They kept tagging in-and-out because he exhausted them so quickly. → Read More

September 22nd, 2010

The Case for Bartz NOT Getting Fired from Yahoo

What the hell? Since my blindingly obvious post yesterday that said the post-2000 crash was worse for tech than this recent one was somehow considered controversial, how about an actual controversial statement to start this morning: Why Yahoo shouldn’t rush to fire Carol Bartz.

Yesterday, we wrote about the Twitter dog pile on Bartz, but I doubt the Yahoo board or management are feeling too much pressure from that– they’ve got actual shareholders to contend with and those shareholders aren’t happy. Many bought into Yahoo assuming there was no way a public traded company could fend off Microsoft forever and now they’ve been stuck in a stock that’s barely budged from $13 a share in recent days and hasn’t gotten over $20 a share during her tenure. (As a reminder Microsoft offered $31 per share.) People are looking for catalysts to make the stock pop and get out. → Read More

September 12th, 2010

Bartz in a China Shop: Has Yahoo's CEO Wrecked the Valley’s Most Valuable Chinese Relationship?

The Chinese aren’t exactly prone to emotional outbursts in front of Western reporters. In China, if you insult a business partner in the press, there’s likely a calculating reason behind it.

Witness the latest volley by Alibaba.com’s CEO David Wei towards Yahoo, which owns 40% of the parent company for his Chinese ecommerce powerhouse. “Why do we need a financial investor with no business synergy or technology?” Wei said to Bloomberg on Friday.

What’s going on behind the scenes? In short, Jack Ma wants Yahoo out of his company, but Yahoo knows it would be crazy to sell before two of the most lucrative divisions of Alibaba, Taobao and Alipay, go public. And according to several sources close to both companies Carol Bartz is making a tense situation worse. → Read More

August 30th, 2010

BizArk Launches Alibaba Rival, Boasts "Tens Of Millions Of Dollars" In Funding

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

August 24th, 2010

Alibaba Buys eBay Auction Software Auctiva

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

August 21st, 2010

Is Search Now A Strategic Industry in China?

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

June 8th, 2010

Web 2.0 to China: Ok, Let’s Try This Again…

Yesterday, I had lunch with one of the top people in the Chinese Internet scene who said, “We have a saying here, ‘Internet multinationals all fail in China, Google was just the last one to go.’”

As sayings go, that’s not especially catchy. But it is devastating. And true even if you count Google’s recent actions as a China morally-based forfeit. The stark truth is there are already more Chinese than Americans online and China is only at about 20% Internet penetration. And yet, so far, Yahoo is the only one to play this market well, by swapping its local assets and $1 billion for a 40% stake in Alibaba back in 2005.

But a funny thing has happened between my last trip to China in October of last year and my current trip. The Silicon Valley Web 2.0 gang has invaded. OK, “invaded” is the wrong word, it’s more like gingerly “waded into the pool.” Most of the entrants are being very cautious, staying below the radar with limited, hedged plans. But there is a clear trend of Web 2.0 testing the Chinese waters—and hoping it doesn’t make the mistake the first generation made. → Read More

January 17th, 2010

The Price Of Google In China

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

September 16th, 2009

Alibaba Turns 10 – Aims To Create 100 Million Jobs, Employ 10 Million People

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

September 14th, 2009

Yahoo Sells $150 Million Worth Of Alibaba.com Shares As Tensions Lurk

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

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