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