April 16th, 2013

China’s E-Commerce Market Grew To $190B In 2012, Driven By Mobile Users and Social Media, Says CNNIC

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China’s e-commerce market racked up a whopping 1.3 trillion RMB ($190 billion USD) worth of transactions in 2012, according to a report by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) (linked article is in Chinese), an increase of 66.5 percent over 2011′s total. Last year, 242 million Internet users purchased goods online, and e-commerce transactions accounted for 6.1 percent… → Read More

March 10th, 2013

Alibaba Names Insider Jonathan Lu As New CEO, Replacing Founder Jack Ma

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Alibaba, China’s e-commerce giant, today named insider Jonathan Lu Xaoxi as its new CEO — filling a hole two months after founder Jack Ma announced that he would be stepping down from the position. The move is another step in the company’s wider restructuring, which saw the creation of some 25 separate business units to account for the company’s various interests, which range from the Taobao… → Read More

January 15th, 2013

Alibaba CEO Jack Ma To Step Down As CEO On May 10th, Stay On As Chairman Of China’s Ecommerce Giant

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Jack Ma, who has been CEO of Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba for the past 14 years (since it was founded in 1999), will step down on May 10 2013 but remain as company chairman — focusing on Alibaba’s strategic vision, talent development to grow the internal leadership team, and corporate social responsibility efforts. Alibaba’s new CEO will be announced when Ma steps down. → Read More

January 10th, 2013

Alibaba CEO Jack Ma Announces Restructuring As The Chinese E-Commerce Giant Moves Farther Away From Yahoo

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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is embarking on a major reorganization of its business structure that will divide the company into 25 different units, each led by a general manager, said CEO Jack Ma in a company-wide email published by Sina News (link via Google Translate, h/t 36Kr). The move is the latest in several the company has made to grab greater control over its future after an → Read More

October 11th, 2012

Like Alibaba, But Safer: YC-Backed HD Trade Services Wants To Be The Platform For Goods Traders In China And Beyond

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We last caught up with HD Trade Services in August, when the company, part of Y Combinator’s summer class, released a tablet app to help smaller enterprises manage the process of buying and shipping goods from one country to another, by offering visual inspections (by way of photos and HD video) of goods to minimize fraud.

Now HD Trade Services is taking that concept one step further: it’s… → Read More

September 21st, 2012

Chinese Ecommerce Giant Alibaba Spins Off Aliyun Mobile OS Team, Puts $200M In Their Pockets

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Chinese web and eCommerce giant Alibaba plans to spin off the team developing its first mobile OS — Aliyun — Reuters is reporting, you know, the OS Google claims is an inappropriate fork of Android. Let’s call it a fork too far. → Read More

September 14th, 2012

Alibaba VP In Response To Google Smackdown: ‘Will Someone Please Ask Google To Define Android?’

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While Marissa Mayer is busy trying to figure out what to do with Yahoo’s new $4.5 billion in cash — recently gained from selling 20 percent of its holdings in Alibaba back to, well, Alibaba — the Chinese web and eCommerce giant has recently been in a heated exchange with Yahoo’s old pal, Google.

The fun apparently began after Taiwanese PC maker Acer cancelled the launch of its new phone in… → Read More

August 10th, 2012

As Marissa Mayer Annoys Investors By Keeping $4.2B In Dividends, YHOO Is Down 5.4%

Yahoo stock after Alibaba dividend announcement

Less than a month after taking over Yahoo, Marissa Mayer is already sending strong signals of leadership to investors. Yet, the announcement of a new financial strategy led to a 5.37 percent downturn of YHOO today as the company played down dividend expectations.

Yahoo filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the strategy review “may lead to a re-evaluation of, or changes to, our… → Read More

December 27th, 2011

A Geek’s Guide to China’s Silicon Valley

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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… → Read More

December 8th, 2011

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

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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

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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… → Read More

September 30th, 2011

Buying Yahoo Is A No-Brainer For Alibaba

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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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More

February 18th, 2008

Chinese Government May Be Concerned About Microsoft's Takeover of Yahoo

An interesting report from Reuters/ eWeek suggests the Chinese Government may be concerned about Microsoft, a firm that uses “monopolistic tactics” buying Yahoo, which will mean Microsoft will become the biggest shareholder in Alibaba, one of China’s biggest internet firms. According to the report Alibaba “will seek a stronger voice for its management team in… → Read More

January 25th, 2008

Globally, Baidu Beats Microsoft in Search; Yandex Creeping Up On Ask

While Google dominates the top slot in search both in the U.S. and worldwide, with a global search market share of 62 percent, there is still a lot of elbowing going on below, especially when you look beyond the U.S. In a comScore ranking of the top-10 global search engines as measured by number of searches during the month of December, 2007, Yahoo comes in at a distant No. 2 with only 13 percent… → Read More