Chinese Internet companies Baidu, Tencent and Qihoo 360 are reportedly competing to purchase Sogou, Sohu‘s search business. Sina Tech’s report cites unnamed sources in the investment industry (link via Google Translate) and Sogou CEO Wang Xiaoquan has already taken to his Sina Weibo account to brush off the report as “unreliable,” but it’s worth noting that rumors of two recent acquisitions–… → Read More
Tencent’s WeChat messenger has made a larger play for the Singapore market, with the release of a TV commercial in the country. The Chinese commercial features two popular Taiwanese stars, and will air on the free-to-air Chinese channels in the country. Louis Song, country manager of Tencent’s international business group for Malaysia and Singapore, said the company hopes to gather more… → Read More
Tencent’s social blogging site, Qzone, has Asia’s largest active social network user base, with 600 million (and counting) users who log in more than twice a month. Besides Qzone, the Chinese Internet giant is perhaps better known for its flagship QQ instant messenger and the exploding WeChat smartphone messaging app. I spoke to Peter Zheng, vice president of Tencent’s social… → Read More
Former Google China head, Kaifu Lee, has been tracking how many times his Weibo posts on Tencent and Sina have been censored and deleted, and has helpfully made a graph of the past 8 months. The outspoken investor has had his tweets deleted most often in the recent weeks because he was discussing the story on the 13,000 dead pigs found in a Shanghai river, as well as a session in the Chinese… → Read More
Tencent, China’s largest Internet company by revenue, announced today that it has hired Peter Cheng, the former chief operating officer of AdChina, as the general manager of Tencent’s online media group advertising platform. Cheng will take charge of all Tencent’s advertising platform-related business and report to SY Lau, the senior executive vice president of Tencent and president of the online… → Read More
China’s Internet juggernaut Tencent announced today that it would undergo a restructuring of its business units into six groups. Ren Yuxin was also named as the new chief operating officer and will head up the media and social-networking groups.
The six groups include: → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → 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 … → 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)… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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’… → Read More
Today is a big day in Asia’s Internet industry. Earlier today, Korea’s NHN said it will buy major Japanese portal Livedoor, and now Tencent, China’s largest Internet company, has announced [PDF] it plans to invest $300 million in cash into Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies (DST).
DST itself has been in the news repeatedly over the last few months, especially after investing $200… → Read More
Despite China’s massively growing internet market, international giants like Google and Facebook are having trouble making gains with the 300 million Chinese online users. China’s netizens are on average very young – 66.7 % of them are younger than 29 years old and 35.2 % of them are teenagers—with social networking and entertainment applications being the most popular.
While companies… → Read More
Tencent, China’s largest Internet portal mostly known to us for its hugely popular instant messenger product QQ, published an updated report on the user numbers of its social networking service QZone last week. The report was only available in Chinese, but the folks over at Web2Asia were kind enough to translate it.
And if the self-reported numbers are not too much of an exaggeration, they’re… → Read More
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