Lee Kai-fu’s decision to quit his job as head of Google China has been portrayed as a major setback for the company as it struggles to catch up with mainland rival Baidu. Yet his successor’s background and preference for a less-technology heavy approach could play very much in the United States company’s favor. Read article in Asia Times.
Investors looking to celebrate after buying into the US$1 billion Nasdaq listing of Shanda Games, the largest US-listed initial public offering (IPO) in more than a year, were left mystified late last month, their fingers burnt as the share price turned flat.
Shanda Interactive, China’s largest online game company, did all right for itself in spinning off Shanda Games, taking the unit to market at the top of an indicated range of $10.50-$12.50, and increasing the amount of shares offered by over 30%.
But by the end of the first day’s trading, buyers of the stock were counting their losses as the shares closed down 14% to $10.80, with little in the way of recovery since then, the price hovering at around $11.01- $11.70 and closing on Monday at $11.26.
That baffled many investors who were looking for a repeat of the success earlier this year of Changyou.com, a similar games-division spin-off by Sohu, China’s second-largest portal. Changyou shares surged 25% on their first day of trading on the Nasdaq in April. Read the article in Asia Times.
CNN’s Cherise Fong did a report about the book. She summed up pretty well what the book is about. I like the following part the most:
“While 25.5 percent of the Chinese population is now online, CNNIC’s 2008 statistics sketch a relatively coherent portrait of the mainstream majority of them: 67 percent are below the age of 30; 73 percent have only a high school education or lower; 33 percent are students; and 28 percent fall into the lowest income bracket of under $75 per month.
Moreover, 78 percent go online at home and 42 percent log on at an Internet cafe. Once connected, 84 percent listen to music, 75 percent instant-message, 63 percent play online games, and only 57 percent e-mail.
In short, for the vast majority of Chinese, Internet means play, not work.
One could conclude that an Internet entrepreneur’s target audience in China is teenage and twenty-something students, low-end consumers in search of entertainment with plenty of time to kill.”
That applies to Tencent, all the online game players, such as Shanda, Netease, Changyou, The9, Perfect World, and so on, and even Baidu. Read complete article in CNN.
I did an interview with CNN last week about the book. Here is me talking a bit about China Internet.
Once a year, around mid summer, there is the China Digital Entertainment Expo and Conference (or more commonly known as China Joy). All the major game companies in China and thousands of their fans gather in Shanghai for the 4-day event. It is like the Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3) in Los Angeles, but noisier and perhaps more entertaining as the game companies showcase their latest hits with models in game customs.
It is organised by General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP), the government department for regulating online game. The above photo was taken in China Joy 2009, where models dressed up as characters in the online games for fans to take pictures.
More photos about China Joy:
In a sudden move, Google China President Lee Kaifu said he would leave the company later this month.
But, industry insiders have been talking about that Lee Kaifu is only the face person for Google China for a long time. The real person in charge is John Liu, the head of sales, Google hired from SK Telecom in 2008.
Lee used to the only one left among the first batch of executives Google hired in China, now, every one of them has gone. This is in fact good for Google, as they are not the right kind anyway – too many of them come from multinational companies, and they are not familiar with local culture.
John Liu understands Chinese users and Chinese business environment better, if he is in charge and if he is also in charge of Google’s R&D direction in China, Google can have a better chance of coming up with popular applications in China – and catch up with Baidu.
Lee’s ideas are similar to Google headquarters’, but they seemed too sophisticate to the ordinary Chinese internet users – who are just young people looking for fun, and friend, online. That’s why Baidu’s MP3 and now Post Bar are magnet to them.
Google, whose Internet search engine has struggled in China to replicate its market dominance elsewhere in the world, is bringing all the firepower it can to overwhelm local rival Baidu in the vast new frontier of Chinese third-generation mobile-phone Internet search.
China didn’t introduce 3G mobile-phone technology until the start of this year, and companies such as Baidu and US-based Google are looking to cash in as the world’s biggest mobile phone market switches to the faster technology. Read the article in Asia Times.
As the last of the 14-part series in Global Times, this week we will try to sum up what are the key differences and how successful Chinese Internet competitors synthesized components from their Western counterparts, all the while innovating to accommodate the unique characteristics of the Chinese market. Read article in Global Times.
For people interested in founding their own ventures in the China, this week’s article in Global Times might be an inspiration to them. Many foreigners worked in the country’s first Internet ventures. And many have arrived since. We look at several stories of westerners who founded their own companies in China – people who had only a smattering of Mandarin at the start and ended up running companies where everyone else is Chinese.
On the day of the migration, traffic to eBay China dropped by half. Despite the serious customer losses, Meg Whitman, then CEO of eBay, only learned about it a month after it occurred, on a visit to Shanghai. Whitman was shocked and very upset. Apparently, even the head of eBay International at the time, who was one of the most ardent proponents of migration, did not tell Whitman about it. Read the article in Global Times.
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