The following press releases and media reports about Chinese companies were carried on April 11. To view a full article or story, click on the link next to the headline.
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- Yum Brands (NYSE: YUM) Still Struggling In China Amid Bird Flu Fears (English article)
- Huawei Gives Long-Term Commitment To Australian Market (company announcement)
- Alibaba Group Names Maggie Wu as CFO (English article)
- Lenovo (HKEx: 992) Denies Plans To Enter Chip Design (Chinese article)
- Youku Tudou (NYSE: YOKU) Adjusts Top Management (Chinese article)
China’s unruly and highly competitive Internet space has created all kinds of interesting partnerships, with word of a new tie-up between e-commerce giant Alibaba and former online game leader Shanda Games (Nasdaq: GAME) emerging as the latest. The driving force behind most of these tie-ups is a desire to drive more traffic to Internet sites as companies search for more customers. In this case, it appears the 2 companies are aiming to sell e-commerce goods to Shanda’s millions of online gamers from Alibaba’s hugely popular TMall online shopping mall. (
Online discount retailer Vipshop (NYSE: VIPS) emerged as one of China’s most remarkable turnaround stories in 2012, as its shares rallied sharply in the second half of the year after a miserable IPO. Now the company is passing more new milestones, reporting its first-ever profit in the fourth-quarter of 2012 and also entering the relatively small club of Chinese Internet firms that can boast of market values of $1 billion or more. The company has also solidified its position as China’s most valuable publicly traded e-commerce firm, after taking the title from older rival Dangdang (NYSE: DANG) last fall.
There’s a flurry of interesting new developments in China’s online search market, which has suddenly become a hotbed of new activity after a several years of quiet during a period of domination by sector leader Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU). Leading the reports is news that e-commerce giant Alibaba, which already operates an e-commerce search site called eTao, is entering the more mainstream search market. At the same time, other reports are saying that Sohu’s (Nasdaq: SOHU) Sogou, the industry’s third largest search engine, is in talks to acquire Soso, the search engine run by Chinese Internet titan Tencent (Nasdaq: 700). Lastly there’s the more minor news bit that the search engine run by the People’s Daily has run into hard times and is laying off up to 10 percent of its staff.
China’s second largest e-commerce site Jingdong Mall may not be good at making profits, but its latest round of mega fund-raising shows it’s become quite adept at convincing wealthy investors of its longer-term viability. Equally important, this latest round of $400 million in new fund raising means Jingdong may still be eying an IPO in the near term, reviving a plan that it launched last year but later abandoned due to a weak market. It would most likely want to make the offering sooner rather than later, since archrival and market leader Alibaba may also looking to make its own multibillion-dollar offering later this year if market conditions remain positive.
US apparel maker Cherokee (Nasdaq: CHKE) made a strategic gamble last week when it largely circumvented China’s traditional retail store network and opened a shop on the Internet, highlighting an emerging new path for foreign mid-sized brands into the lucrative sector. (
After several misguided e-commerce initiatives that ended in failure, Internet giant Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) is finally making what looks like a smart move in the highly competitive space by focusing on what it does best: providing search services. In this case, media are reporting that China’s dominant provider online search company has quietly launched an e-commerce search engine, in what looks like a direct challenge to e-commerce leader Alibaba’s own eTao e-commerce search site.
Interesting new rumors are appearing in the media about a possible alliance between 2 of China’s most up-and-coming search engines, Sohu’s (Nasdaq: SOHU) Sogou and Qihoo 360′s (NYSE: QIHU) So.com. While such an alliance looks very smart and could mount a serious challenge to longtime industry leader Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU), I would be seriously skeptical that anything will ever happen. The main obstacle is simple, and is the same obstacle that prevents mergers and other strategic tie-ups from happening more broadly in China’s Internet world: big egos. In this case, we’re talking about 2 of the Chinese Internet world’s biggest egos who are notoriously difficult collaborators, namely Sohu’s chairman chief executive Charles Zhang and Qihoo’s founder and chief executive Zhou Hongyi.
