The biggest barrier to starting a company isn’t ideas, funding or experience. It’s excuses. And you can understand why: Starting a company is scary. It’s little wonder that even the best entrepreneurs go through a period of doubt and excuses not to take the plunge.
So when I hear complaints from entrepreneurs in other areas of the US or in other countries about how they can’t start companies because there is no angel money, no mentors, no employees that will work for a startup, I always wonder how much of these gripes are truly insurmountable odds to new company formation and how much are the grousing of someone looking for someone else to blame.
In China, the complaint du jour is that the entrepreneurs are trying to push beyond just founding companies that are clones of Western Web brands, and it’s the VCs that won’t take the risk on truly new ideas. Over two days of backstage deliberation at Disrupt Beijing, I got to see first-hand how the mind of the Chinese VC works. And I have to say, Chinese entrepreneurs have a valid point. → Read More
As we announced last week, we’ve been busy securing some of the most exciting names in China for our Disrupt Beijing conference this October including Tencent Founder and CEO Pony Ma and Chinese entrepreneur and angel investor Lei Jun. But it wouldn’t be a TechCrunch event without bringing a little of that Silicon Valley magic too.
In selecting people to bring to China we wanted a mix of some people who are new to the country and others who have a long experience doing business there; people who are existing successes and those who have a fast-growing, tiger-by-the-tail right now. We also wanted a few people who could speak to the culture and whimsy that makes the Valley so unique. → Read More
Even before I worked at TechCrunch, Disrupt was one of the few industry conferences I looked forward to every year. There were two big reasons why: The enthusiasm and excitement of the startups who launch there, and the unparalleled lineup of the most exciting people in tech engaging in frank, honest conversations.
When we expanded the franchise to New York, it was natural to bring the most exciting Silicon Alley names on stage. That has included people like Fred Wilson and Dennis Crowley, but also the top names in media like Charlie Rose and Arianna Huffington. We even threw New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the mix.
In thinking through the lineup for Disrupt Beijing– our first ever International conference– I wanted to make sure we were bringing some of the most interesting personalities from the West to China. But more important was that we anchor the show with the most interesting names in the Chinese tech scene we could find. → Read More
Tencent, a major provider of Internet and mobile services in China, has reported second quarter earnings today, and unfortunately fell short of analyst expectations. Revenue came in at $1 billion, an increase of 44.3% from the second quarter of 2010.
Profit for the period was 2.35 Yuan (Around $362.1 million), which is an increase of 21.3% year over year. Analysts expected 2.54 billion Yuan in terms of net profit. Net margin decreased to 34.8% from 45.5% last quarter. For the first half of 2011, Tencent’s total revenues were 2.02 billion, an increase of 47% from 2010.
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China currently has the most Internet users of any country in the world, with some 420 million people connecting to the Web. Some more recent statistics even put that number as high as 485 million. Granted, China has a population of just over 1.3 billion, which means only 32 percent of its population is using the Web, a percentage far lower than the U.S. and Japan (at at 77 percent and 78 percent, respectively).
Of course, with web activity continuing to grow rapidly in China, the Asian power represents an enormous digital market, even as the so-called “Great Firewall of China” has made it difficult (or impossible) to fully transport international digital technologies and businesses to the Chinese market. → Read More
Silicon Valley loves to dismiss Asian companies as nothing more than copycats who thrive, particularly in China, because the government protects them and punishes Western competitors. Even when the businesses in question are dramatically different in practice and scale, they are described as the “eBay of China”, “The Google of China” and “the YouTube of China,” not Alibaba, Baidu and YouKu. I’ve argued why this is mostly nonsense before.
But the starkest argument that Asia does indeed innovate may be found in the world of free-to-play games and virtual goods. This is a new market we’re in a lather about here with the impending $1 billion IPO of Zynga, but one that is much larger and more than ten years old in Asia.
And one of the industry’s pioneers, Nexon, is also said to be readying itself for an IPO. And get this: It has higher revenues, far better margins and dramatically better user engagement statistics than Zynga. → Read More
Chinese internet giant Tencent and U.S. travel bookings company Expedia have invested in Chinese travel site eLong, totaling $126 million. Tencent has acquired approximately 16% of the outstanding shares for a total purchase price of $84.4 million and becomes the second largest shareholder of eLong.
Expedia has acquired approximately 8% of the outstanding shares for $41.2 million, holds 56% of the outstanding shares (Expedia held a a previous investment in eLong), making the company the largest shareholder in eLong. → Read More
Boutique tech investment bank Pacific Crest Securities has purchased Pacific Epoch, a Shanghai-based investment research firm specializing in technology. This gives Pacific Crest fifty more bodies on the ground in China to deliver investors better investment research than “This is the (fill-in-the-blank-Western-Internet-company) of China.”
That lazy marketing strategy has helped companies like YouKu (aka THE YOUTUBE OF CHINA!….nevermind it doesn’t really do user generated content) or RenRen (aka THE FACEBOOK OF CHINA!) to get heady IPO pops, but it doesn’t help investors have a clue what they are really buying or the context of those companies on the ground. Historically boutique banks are better at doing this than the bulge bracket firms. (See the “four horsemen“ who helped build Silicon Valley.) → Read More
Tencent, a major provider of Internet and mobile services in China, this morning revealed earnings for the first quarter of 2011, reporting a better-than-expected 61 percent jump in net income.
The company’s profit rose to 2.87 billion yuan (roughly $442 million), up from 1.78 billion yuan (roughly $274 million) a year earlier. Total revenues were 6,33 billion yuan (approximately $975 million), an increase of 14.7 percent over the fourth quarter of 2010. → Read More
We’ve all got iPhone mania in the Valley, never mind that Apple tracks our every move and won’t explain why or that AT&T users can’t actually make calls.
But in Asia– and much of the rest of the developing world– the anticipated mobile giant is Android. Android phones are just starting to hit Japan and China, and a flood of cheap new models are expected to come on the market within the next year. Expect a flood of new apps to follow that, particularly in China where venture capital is flowing like water.
The rise of Android is as close to a no-brainer prediction as you can make with always volatile and uncertain emerging markets. Combine the market size of countries like Japan, China, Indonesia and India with cheap, increasingly-sophisticated devices and a massive base of gamemakers and hackers and someone is going to make a lot of money. → Read More
China’s got game. A lot of game. In fact, the Eastern power is rapidly becoming the world’s leader in the online games market. According to a study released by business and consulting firm Pearl Research, the online games market in China will exceed $8 billion by 2014.
Though the Chinese gaming market experienced somewhat sluggish growth in the first part of 2010, by year’s end it had rebounded to 25 percent overall growth, reaching $5 billion in sales. Thus, it seems that it is no longer even remotely outlandish to predict that China will make up a quarter of the industry’s total global sales by 2014, with the U.S. falling to 22 percent, as forecasted by The Financial Times, via investment bank Digi-Capital in February. → Read More
There’s trouble in Tencent and Groupon’s China group buying joint venture, Gaopeng.com, according to press reports from China. Apparently the site went up for a day, Tencent balked and pulled it back down. Beyond that, people tell us the operation is pure chaos: Rapid hiring, little due diligence and money being thrown around. The biggest gripe: It’s almost entirely run by foreigners.
It sounds like exactly what you’d expect based on this hiring ad, we printed a few weeks ago. It boasts of near-infinite funds, goals to hire 1,000 people by March and an emphasis on consultants and MBAs– not people versed in the local market. Chinese language skills aren’t even mentioned in the ad.
It’s easy to say this is just another botched joint venture and another arrogant US Internet company swaggering into China, thinking its brand name and wads of cash will bridge cultural gaps. Given the track record of US companies entering China, it’s actually hard to say anything but that. → Read More
If you blinked you might have missed last Friday’s news that Chinese Web giant Tencent is buying LA-based Riot Games. And that’s just fine by Tencent.
Tencent and its founder Pony Ma (seen in a sea of winking penguins to your left) are incredibly press-shy, as everything about the way the deal “leaked” demonstrates. It came late on a Friday before the Superbowl, it was positioned as Tencent buying an undisclosed “majority share” and not an acquisition – even the subsequent analysis was that it was just more proof of how hot the US gaming market is. Even Chinese companies were buying into it!
In fact, this deal represents way more than that – and anyone in the game industry should be paying attention. → Read More
Nokia this morning announced two deals with leading Chinese Internet companies SINA and Tencent, who will be integrating with Nokia’s Ovi Maps in China.
Millions of users of SINA’s microbloging service and Tencent’s massively popular online community QQ (636 million users and counting) will be able to share their location through Nokia mobile devices, check-in to locations and upload content tied to location, such as recommendations and reviews of restaurants, shops and movie theatres. → Read More
Exclusive - QQ is breath-takingly huge in China. A product of Internet juggernaut Tencent, the household instant messaging client boasts some 600 million active users in total – roughly 90 percent of China’s Internet population – of which about 120 million concurrent users access the service on any given day.
Today, the company is launching a full-fledged instant messaging client for international usage dubbed QQi version 1.0, in an effort to broaden its scope even more (download it here).
In addition, the company plans to launch a multi-language social networking service in early 2011, TechCrunch has learned. → Read More
The biggest difference between the Internet scenes in Silicon Valley and China this year? We’re all still asking when Facebook will go public, while Chinese companies are filing left and right. Part of this is an investor demand to get a chunk of that 400 million person strong and growing Chinese Internet market.
But part of this is cultural. American Internet entrepreneurs are more likely to want to sell their companies these days. But in China, it’s like the late 1990s: Success equals an IPO. On the other side of the bargaining table, American companies like to buy technology, engineers and potential competitors and aren’t afraid to potentially overpay to get what they want. Chinese Internet companies have the cash and the stock currency: Tencent is the third largest Internet company in the world by market cap and Baidu is the fifth. But so far, they’ve been loathe to do big acquisitions that would dilute the corporate culture.
That has to change at some point… doesn’t it? We ask DCM’s Ruby Lu about the implications of this IPO-only culture, especially the talent war it’s creating among big companies and startups in China’s hotspots. Video below. → Read More
At Tencent headquarters there are pictures of its cutesy penguin mascot everywhere. Sometimes he’s winking and smiling, and sometimes he’s getting all badass. It’s also how the company behaves in the market.
As you may have read, a strange and dramatic fight is escalating in the Chinese Internet between Qihoo 360 and Tencent, maker of the ubiquitous QQ messaging platform.
Why should you care if you’re not in China? Because China is the largest Web audience in the world and Tencent is the king of it. At north of $40 billion, it also has the third largest market capitalizations of any Web company globally, just edging out eBay and soaring even higher in the last few months. And it has international ambitions. It owns 10% of Mail.ru, which in turn owns huge chunks of Facebook, Groupon, Zynga and other Western Web 2.0 giants. Watching how Tencent throws its weight around the Web is now as important as watching precedents set by Google or Facebook. → Read More
Quick quiz: Who are the three largest Internet companies in the world by market capitalization?
If you guessed Google and Amazon you got two right, but I’m betting few of our American readers guessed the third. I certainly wouldn’t have a year ago. It’s not eBay or Yahoo; it’s Tencent. If you are in the Web space and haven’t heard of them, read this post, because Tencent’s cutesy penguin mascot is only going to cast a larger shadow in the global Web world in coming years. → Read More
Back in March I thought that Google pulling out of China would hurt Google’s Chinese employees and shareholders more than anyone. The search engine was a distant number two in the market to Baidu, and many of the people already using Google in China, I assumed, were doing so through VPNs anyway, meaning the government blocking it wouldn’t immediately change much in terms of users’ experience. Beyond that, I figured startups in China’s thriving Web scene would rush in to fill any void.
But I underestimated one big thing: The impact the lack of Google would have on China’s Web businesses. By essentially handing Baidu a short-term monopoly on keywords, user acquisition costs have gone through the roof, infuriating many of the people who were originally sympathetic to Google’s case just a few months ago. “They should have just not come into the market to begin with if this is how they were going to act”—if I heard that statement once in the last two weeks I spent in China, I heard it a dozen times.
This wasn’t all Google’s fault. Frankly put, the company didn’t have enough market share to wreck things on its own. But it was icing on the cake of an increasingly unsustainable situation. → Read More
