China Tech News

Employees of the UK's Skyscanner are readying to welcome their new Chinese owners.

Ctrip.com International, Ltd. has agreed to acquire all shares of Skyscanner Holdings Ltd., a U.K.-based global travel search site, for approximately £1.4 billion.

The purchase price consists of cash mainly, with the minority in Ctrip shares and loan notes. The deal has won board approval at both companies and is expected to close by the end of this year.

Skyscanner's current management team will continue to manage the company's operations independently as part of the Ctrip group, the announcement said.

Skyscanner enables users to compare prices from hundreds of travel sites when searching for flights, hotels, and rental cars.

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One of the world's largest social networks aimed at homosexual men just raised funding from a Shanghai firm.
Shanghai-based venture firm Ventech China has led a US$8 million series A funding round in Hornet, the start-up announced.

With over 15 million total and three million monthly active users, Hornet recently integrated gay city guide Vespa, which has over 5,000 places and 300 city guides in 70 countries and event listings, into its functionality.
Ventech China manages US$225 million focused on communities, mobile commerce and big data.

Its current portfolio companies include Keep, a Chinese fitness training and community app; Blued, China's largest gay community app; WonderFull, a Japanese product mobile commerce platform; Juzi, an entertainment news platform; and Datawin, a big data company in sales leads generation.


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Tking.cn, which claims to be the Stubhub of China, just closed its series A round investment.

Matrix Partners China, DCM Ventures and Nanshan Capital invested US$10 million in its series A and series A+ round.
Tking.cn operates an online ticketing platform under the Niumowang brand. Stubhub is an online ticket exchange owned by eBay in the United States.

The online event ticket marketplace in China is currently dominated by a few larger players, including Maoyan, the merged Gewara and Wepiao, Alibaba's Taobao online ticketing arm and Mtime, each taking a 36%, 30%, 6% and 6% market share, respectively, according to Credit Suisse.

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QuantGroup, which provides online financial services including credit-based consumption and IOUs, has reportedly closed a RMB500 million investment round.

China's Sunshine Insurance Group Corporation led the series C round of financing in QuantGroup, and Fosun Capital, Guosen Hongsheng Investment Co., Ltd., and other undisclosed investors also participated.

Fosun said it hopes that QuantGroup can cooperate with financial tech companies it has invested in the past. The Chinese insurance and investment holding group also established an Internet finance arm in 2015 providing P2P lending and other wealth management products.

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South Korean online game company ACTOZ announced that they have appointed Guo Haibin, former general manager of Qihoo 360's online game business unit, as new chief executive officer of the company, replacing Qian Donghai, president of Shanda Games.

According to the appointment email sent by ACTOZ's board of directors, the company believes that Guo's experience will help them promote their global mobile game development and operation and full intellectual property development.

After Shanda Games gained the controlling shares of ACTOZ in 2007, the South Korean company has been the overseas operating center of Shanda Games. In 2013, Shanda Games successfully launched Million Arthur and ACTOZ was the global operating core for the game. In June 2015, ACTOZ revealed a large plan, which covered 30 new mobile games, during its global strategy conference and the company further enhanced its role as the overseas publishing center of Shanda Games.

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The band will play on for Netease.com. The Web portal's cloud music division has launched a project to support independent musicians in China with CNY200 million.

Over the next year, NetEase cloud music will use the CNY200 million investment to help independent musicians gain promotional resources, album investments, performance opportunities, and music training.

Zhu Yiwen, chief executive officer of NetEase cloud music, said that according to their previous musician survey results, about 68% of musicians only had average monthly income of below CNY1,000 from their music; while less than 5% of musicians can achieve monthly income of over CNY10,000 from music. To change this situation, NetEase cloud music announced this project to support independent musicians.

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Baidu Map has reached strategic cooperation deals with the tourism bureaus of the four Northern European countries: Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark.

Baidu Map's representative told local Chinese media they would jointly begin operational activities by exchanging data and sharing promotional resources to improve the travel experience of Chinese tourists to promote the sustainable development of the tourism industry of the four Northern European countries.

Baidu Map has already reached similar strategic cooperation with Thailand and South Korea. At the same time, they announced plans to launch services in 106 countries in Africa, Europe, and Asia by the end of this month, as they aim to cover 209 countries and regions around the world and 99% of the world's population.

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Starbucks and Tencent have formed a strategic partnership to deploy WeChat payment in Starbucks stores in mainland China.

Starting from December 8, 2016, Starbucks began introducing WeChat payment into its stores in mainland China. Chinese consumers will now be able to buy Starbucks' coffee and other products with WeChat payment.
The cooperation will bring together the international coffee chain and the Chinese Internet service giant. Starbucks has nearly 2,500 stores in China and its average annual sales for its individual stores in 2016 were about USD840,000. Meanwhile, WeChat payment has about 400 million users.

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One of the top buzzwords in China's Internet the past 18 months has been "Internet Plus", which is Premier Li Keqiang's focus on merging e-commerce, online banking, and industrial networks.

This government initiative now is being adopted by companies, with China Mobile and Alibaba being the latest to forge unions to make Internet Plus work. China Mobile and Alibaba recently signed their Internet Plus strategic cooperation framework agreement in Beijing.

China Mobile's president Li Yue and Alibaba Group's chief executive officer Zhang Yong signed the strategic cooperation framework agreement on behalf of the two parties. China Mobile's Chairman Shang Bing; Vice President Sha Yuejia; Alibaba Group's Chairman Jack Ma,; Ant Financial Group's CEO Jing Xiandong; Alibaba Group's CTO Zhang Jianfeng; Alibaba's Senior VP and Aliyun's President Hu Xiaoming; and Rookie Network's CEO Tong Wenhong attended the signing ceremony.

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Fujitsu's president Tatsuya Tanaka says his company hopes to sign a PC business merger agreement with China's Lenovo before March 31, 2017, which is the end of Fujitsu's financial year.

Tanaka made the remarks during a media interview widely circulated on Chinese websites.

Prior to this, rumors floated that Fujitsu and Lenovo were discussing a deal in PC design and manufacturing.

Tanaka also said that information security will become the core of its information technology business. Over the next three years, Fujitsu plans to invest USD869 million in IT security research and development. With the cooperation of the two parties, Lenovo will focus on Fujitsu's PC business, while Fujitsu can focus on enterprise IT services.

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Yang Xiaowei, general manager of China Telecom, revealed that China Telecom plans to have 1.15 million 4G base stations in 2017 and they will build the world's first low-frequency 4G network basing on the 800MHz frequency.
Yang made the comments during a terminal industry summit in Chongqing, and the company explained its development plans for 2017 in detail during the meeting.

At the same time, Yang clarified the future development direction of China Telecom. The company will cooperate with the entire industrial chain to establish five major business ecospheres, covering smart connections, smart homes, Internet finance, new ICT services, and Internet of Things. This meshes well with the government's "Internet Plus" strategy espoused by Premier Li Keqiang.

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Alibaba's ecosystem comprises China's biggest Internet marketplace, and it's again in the crosshairs of United States Trade Representative Michael Froman.

The USTR's annual report this year says that Alibaba's Taobao.com e-commerce platform is an important concern due to the large volume of allegedly counterfeit and pirated goods available and the challenges right holders experience in removing and preventing illicit sales and offers of such goods.
The USTR says Alibaba is making headway in eliminating counterfeits from its platform, but that current levels of reported counterfeiting and piracy are still unacceptably high.

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'Tis the season for pink slips and cost-cutting, and PC behemoth Lenovo is putting coal in the stockings of its workers in Brazil.

As a part of its plans to reduce expenses, Lenovo will restructure its businesses in Brazil and cut 84% of its staff there.

The Chinese company initially planned to build a 52,000-square-meter manufacturing plant in Itu, a city in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil. However, the company now decided to move it to Indaiatuba, the suburb of Sao Paulo, and the plant area will be reduced by half.

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China's domestic mobile phone market realized shipments of 54.52 million units in November 2016, a year-on-year increase of 2.4%.

And its shipments reached 497 million units in the first 11 months of 2016, a year-on-year increase of 7.6%, according to the latest statistics released by China Academy of Telecommunication Research of MIIT.
The statistics also showed that from January to November 2016, Chinese-made branded mobile phones realized shipments of 442 million units, a year-on-year increase of 16.1%, and it accounted for 89% of total mobile phones shipped in China.

Chinese mobile phone brands are becoming more popular among Chinese users. A mobile phone satisfaction and communications performance report for the second half of 2016 published by China Telecom showed that for mobile phones with prices of over CNY3,500, Huawei's P9 plus received the best feedback from Chinese users, followed by Apple's iPhone 7 plus and iPhone 7.

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Even with the explosive growth of technology in China, it's still important to remember that China is still a nation of peasants. So Alibaba's Ant Financial is now focusing its sights on a new rural financial services strategy.

To this end, the company announced plans to make a strategic investment in CFPA Microfinance and to establish a joint venture with China Insurance. The investment totals and equity stakes were not made available by the parties.
Through these deals, Ant Financial will drive growth around three major business models. The first is the data-based financial platform model, which is at the bottom of the pyramid. Relying on e-commerce services, Ant Financial's various platforms will provide comprehensive financial services, including payments, insurance, and credit, to nationwide users involved in the agriculture industry.

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Taiwan's three leading smartphone manufacturers Asus, HTC, and Acer are all unable to meet sales targets for 2016.

Asus expects to ship 20 million smartphones in 2016, which is lower than its sales target of 25 million units. The main reason for its unsatisfactory sales performance is attributed to its weak smartphone sales in mainland China, America, and Europe. Moreover, the shipment delay of its ZenFone 3 also affected the sales.

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Chinese telecom device maker Huawei reportedly plans to acquire Israeli cloud database security start-up HexaTier for up to US$42 million.

The two parties are expected to reach an agreement soon, according to reports in foreign media. On the completion of the acquisition, Huawei will build a cloud database research and development center in Israel via HexaTier.
Neither Huawei nor HexaTier refused to comment on the news.

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Carrefour's Hubei regional office announced the launch of its Carrefour online store, which is the latest online-to-offline business of this French retailer in China.

This marks Carrefour's latest O2O e-commerce market development in China, following similar moves in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Kunming, Wuxi, and Jiangsu.

At present, Carrefour has nine hypermarkets in Wuhan. With the launch of the O2O business, the company will be able to integrate its offline store resources. Carrefour will use those physical stores as sub-warehouses and distribution sites and the orders placed via the online store or mobile app will be pushed to the nearest store and the goods will be delivered by SF Express.

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Chinese Internet company Tencent announced business restructuring and personnel changes for its QQ music business line.

The company revealed that they will establish a QQ music business line, which will be responsible for the development and operation of music products, including QQ Music and Kg.qq.com, an online karaoke platform. This new QQ music business line will have a platform product unit, a social media product unit, and a basic platform unit.
Meanwhile, Tencent announced the establishment of several related departments, including a music finance department, copyrights management department, legal affairs department, and human resources department.

In regards to personnel changes, Tencent appointed Hu Min as chief financial officer of Tencent music, leading Tencent's music finance management; Hou Deyang was appointed vice president of Tencent music, leading the full business and management of QQ music business line; Wu Weilin was appointed vice president of Tencent music group, leading the group's copyrights management; Luo Yi was appointed deputy general manager of the platform product unit of QQ music business line, leading human resources management of the group's related departments and QQ music business line; and Yang Qihu was appointed general legal adviser of Tencent music, leading legal management of Tencent music.

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British data center company Global Switch, which is owned by the Reuben Brothers, has sold 49% of its shares to a consortium formed by Chinese investors.

The shares were sold to a consortium named "Elegant Jubilee" for GBP2.4 billion, which is about CNY20.6 billion. Global Switch was acquired by David Reuben and Simon Reuben for GBP585 million in 2004 and they invested GBP1 billion to expand the businesses since then.

The consortium is reportedly led by Li Qiang, major shareholder of Daily-Tech Beijing; and the largest investor is Jiangsu Sha Steel Group, which is one of the largest private steel companies in China.

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Chinese mobile phone manufacturer Oppo plans to invest USD216 million to build an industrial park in India's Greater Noida, and this project will include a manufacturing plant.

According to Sky Li, Oppo's vice president and president for its India branch, the company's industrial park will cover an area of 1,000 acres and the construction will be divided into stages. The entire project is expected to be completed in two or three years. Its initial annual output is expected to be 50 million phones and its ultimate goal is to produce 100 million phones every year.

At present, Oppo already has one factory in Greater Noida.

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Horizon Robotics, a Chinese start-up focusing on artificial intelligence algorithm chips, systems, software, and hardware, revealed that the company has reached a deal with Intel.

According to Horizon Robotics, they will launch an Advanced Driver Assistance Systems product prototyping system together with Intel during CES 2017 in Las Vegas. This system is reportedly based on a monocular camera and FPGA. Horizon Robotics is the technical solutions provider for the system, while Intel offers hardware support.
Yu Kai, chief executive officer of Horizon Robotics, said that they will show the testing video of this system to the public. Yu also emphasized that their cooperation with Intel is open and non-exclusive.

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During the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s, it was common to see old-school Chinese work units and staid State-owned companies transform themselves overnight into high-tech businesses. News from Hubei suggests the trend has not died.

Hubei Guochuang Hi-tech Material Co., Ltd. has agreed to acquire Shenzhen Yunfang Internet Technology Co., the operator of online real estate leasing and agency platform Qfang.com, for RMB380 million.
Shenzhen-listed Guochuang Hi-tech is an asphalt manufacturer and says it will raise RMB2 billion from eight investors, and plans to use the proceeds to pay for the transaction.

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Is a Chinese private equity firm hoping to take on e-commerce giant Alibaba via a new investment?
China-based private equity firm Hillhouse Capital is reportedly making a USD250 million minority investment in Magento Commerce, a cloud e-commerce provider. Magento was previously owned by eBay, but became an independent entity in 2015.

The Hillhouse investment will be used to fuel the American company's worldwide growth, with an emphasis on Asia. Magento's cloud-based open platform is supported by a global ecosystem of solution integrators and technology partners.

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Not only will China's biggest search engine have access to netizens' online search habits, it will soon also hold dominion over their bank accounts too.

Baidu Inc. reportedly obtained regulatory approval to establish a direct banking unit in partnership with China CITIC Bank.

The joint venture bank named Baixin Bank will tentatively have RMB2 billion in registered capital. Baixin Bank, which is 70% owned by CITIC Bank, with the remaining stake held by Baidu, will not have any brick-and-mortar outlets. It will only operate via the Internet, ATMs and mobile banking.
Rivals Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., founded their own banking units in 2014 and 2015, respectively.

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Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group will cooperate with American wearable technology company Kopin to set up a new company.

This new venture was announced at CES and aims to jointly develop augmented reality smart wearable industry solutions and expand the global AR commercial use market.

Based on the cooperation between the companies, Kopin will invest technologies and capital to provide a whole set of industrial smart glasses solutions, including the latest miniature displays, optics, software, and Whisper voice chip technologies. The two parties will work together to promote the development of their joint venture to expand its leading advantages in the global AR market.

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Chinese more Chinese going out to eat, restaurants are under pressure to ensure reservation booking are handled efficiently. Meiweibuyongdeng's mobile app hopes to solve this problem.

Alibaba's local-services platform, Koubei, and Zhongshi Capital reportedly invested in Meiweibuyongdeng, a mobile app that helps restaurants better manage their bookings and customer wait times.

The financial details of the investment were not disclosed, according to an announcement. The company said the series C+ round values the start-up at RMB3 billion.

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Online games have become a huge spectator sport in China, and new statistics show the overall market scale topped CNY40 billion last year.

China's mobile e-sports market saw rapid development and became one of the major drivers for the growth of e-sports. Due to the surge of mobile e-sports users, the overall e-sports user group also increased quickly and reached 170 million. In addition, the e-sports industrial chain became more complete and the maturity of the industry was further improved.

China's mobile e-sports market scale was CNY5 billion in 2015 and the number increased to CNY11.2 billion in 2016, representing a year-on-year increase of 120%. In the future, more mobile e-sports products will be launched and further promote the development of the mobile gaming market.

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Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has reached an Advanced Audio Coding patent licensing agreement with Via Licensing Corporation.

Under the agreement, Via will allow Xiaomi to use the patented technologies in its AAC patent pool on Xiaomi's full channel of products. Via's AAC technologies can achieve high audio quality via high compression efficiency and lower data consumption and processing power.

Via Licensing Corporation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dolby Laboratories and it has over 50 years of experience in technology and innovation licensing. The company is committed to the development and management of licensing programs for mandated, de facto, and emerging standards on behalf of innovative technology companies in the audio, broadcast, wireless, and automotive markets.

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Hard disk manufacturer Seagate announced that they will shut down their plant in Suzhou and cut over 2,000 employees.

The Suzhou plant already posted a dissolution notice, stating that due to "continuous operating efficiency optimization", they have to make the decision to dissolve the plant ahead of schedule. According to the notice, Seagate will pay compensation according to China's Labor Contract Law. Staff turnover procedures will be handled between January 11 and January 18, 2017.

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Rumored previously to be heading for a job at Tencent, Lu Qi is now confirmed to be making Baidu is his new home.
The Chinese search engine is making Lu its group president and chief operating officer, in charge of products, technology, sales, marketing and operations.

Lu was formerly global executive vice president at Microsoft, and he is a noted expert in artificial intelligence.
As a Microsoft veteran, Lu was responsible for business across productivity, communications, education, search and other information services, including Microsoft Office, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Yammer, Lync, Skype, Bing, Bing Apps, MSN and the Advertising platforms.

Before joining Microsoft, Lu spent ten years as a Yahoo! senior executive, including as the executive vice president overseeing the development of Yahoo!’s Web search and monetization platforms.

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Future Mobility, an electric car company jointly invested by Tencent and Foxconn and run by foreigners in China, plans to invest CNY11.64 billion, which is about USD1.7 billion, to build a plant in Nanjing.

The nascent technology company aims to seize opportunities brought by the growing demand for electric cars in China and other countries.

On the completion of this new plant, its final production capacity will reach 300,000 vehicles per year. Future Mobility did not reveal when they can realize this production capacity; however, the company said that the first-phase project will be completed in 2019 and its annual production capacity will reach 150,000 vehicles by then.
Future Mobility said based on the plans of the company, their first product made in the Nanjing plant will be a pure electric medium-sized smart SUV, which will be sold worldwide.

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With just days before the start of the week-long Chinese New Year holiday, some Chinese technology workers are set to lose their jobs at an iconic American tech company.

Oracle will reportedly cut about 200 research and development jobs in Beijing and the laid-off employees were asked to complete exit procedures by March 31, 2017.

Oracle will integrate its research and development businesses to focus on a cloud computing direction, so product teams in some markets will be axed.

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Few foreigners can do well over a sustained time period within China's insular technology sector, and fewer can do well within the confines of a Chinese-managed business.

Xiaomi's Hugo Barra is the latest expatriate to depart China, as his blocked-in-China Facebook post today outlined his planned departure in February after Chinese New Year. His upbeat post appeared to shed little light on the reasons for his departure beyond that the job has "taken a huge toll on my life and started affecting my health".
The smartphone maker grabbed Android expert Barra away from Google three years ago at the same time as Barra was rumored to be going through a romantic feud with one of Google's founders. So the leap across the Pacific came at a good time for Barra and for Xiaomi, which needed some star power to get beyond the confines of China and expand into new global markets.

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JD Group's chief executive officer Liu Qiangdong recently visited Midea and signed a CNY20 billion strategic cooperation agreement with Fang Hongbo, chairman and president of Midea Group.

The two parties will enhance their strategic cooperation in smart home appliances, smart home services, sales channel expansion, product customization, and big data analysis.

Liu said that with its artificial intelligence and automation technologies, JD has helped a lot of traditional brands improve efficiency and lower costs to realize enterprise transformation and upgrade. JD is glad to achieve win-win with the manufacturing industry via strategic cooperations.

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China's Tsinghua Unigroup announced on its official website that the group plans to invest CNY260 billion to build a semiconductor industrial base and its new IT investment and R&D headquarters project in Nanjing, Jiangsu province.
Of the total investment, about USD30 billion will be allocated to the semiconductor industrial base, which will mainly produce 3D-NAND flash and DRAM memory chips.

Tsinghua Unigroup said that the first phase of this semiconductor project will have USD10 billion investment and it expects to make 100,000 chips on a monthly basis. The establishment of this project will strongly support China's development in the mainstream memory sector.


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A Chinese consortium named United Luck Consortium has invested USD1 billion in the acquisition of mobile app developer Outfit7, wich developed Talking Tom Cat.

Goldman Sachs is reportedly the exclusive financial consultant for Outfit and its shareholders and Taylor Wessing is the legal consultant.

Prior to this, rumors swirled that Zhejiang Jinke Entertainment Culture Co., Ltd was the investor. However, Outfit7 announced in a press release that the shareholders of the company have sold a 100% stake to the United Luck Consortium.

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In the fourth quarter of 2016, Chinese enterprises gained four seats among the top five smartphone brands in the Indian market.

According to the report from market research firm Counterpoint Research, the South Korean smartphone giant Samsung still topped the Indian smartphone market with 24% market share, followed by four Chinese smartphone makers. Vivo ranked second with 10% market share; Xiaomi and Lenovo both gained 9% market share; and Oppo gained 8% market share. Meanwhile, India's local mobile phone companies were expelled from the top five list for the first time.

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Taiwanese Uber drivers and riders are going to see their apps become unresponsive tomorrow. Uber announced that the company would suspend its services in Taiwan from February 10, 2017, due to huge costs in this marketplace.
According to Uber, the company hopes to find an alternative method to operate in Taiwan. If they are able to restart conversations with the Taiwanese local government, they would consider reopening of their services.

Uber reportedly entered the Taiwanese market four years ago and it provided over 15 million rides in four cities in Taiwan. However, Taiwan's investment review committee stated in 2016 that they might ask Uber to withdraw from the Taiwanese market, because the scope of business initially applied by the company was as an information technology platform, but they are now operating transportation services.

The Taiwanese government said that if Uber wants to continue its operations in Taiwan, they need to pay sales tax, which is probably up to USD6.4 million.

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Jason Mackenzie, global vice president of HTC, announced his departure from the Taiwanese company at the beginning of February 2017 during the Chinese New Year holiday, and he expressed his gratitude to HTC's former chief executive officer Peter Chou and current chief executive officer Cher Wang.

Mackenzie did not disclose the reasons for his sudden departure or his future planning.

Mackenzie served HTC for 12 years. He worked as HTC's president of North America region for a long time and was promoted to executive vice president a year ago, leading the company's global business operations.

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