China Tech News

Following several years' operation in the Japanese market, Chinese search engine company Baidu announced a decision to close its Japanese search engine service Baidu.jp.

A spokesperson from Baidu confirmed that the Japanese search engine has been shut down. However, the spokesperson quoted in local Chinese media said they will not rule out the possibility to re-launch the services in the future or provide search services via other platforms in Japan.

According to public files, Baidu announced its international strategy in 2006 and took the Japanese market as its first stop outside China. In March 2007, the company started testing in Japan and the services were formally launched on January 23, 2008.

Commenting on choosing Japan as the first stop, Robin Li, chairman of Baidu, once explained that competition in the Japanese market was not too severe and its structure was stable for several years, with the search market shared by Yahoo and Google. Li said that both companies were non-Japanese companies and it would be better for Japanese consumers to have one more option.

After many years of operation, Baidu admitted that it is obvious their Japanese search engine did not attract a lot of users. Disregarding the closure of Baidu.jp, the Chinese company will maintain its office in Japan and continue to promote its Simeiji app, which is a keyboard app for Japanese input on iOS and Android devices.

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At Huawei's Global Analyst Summit, the company's rotating CEO and deputy chairman Xu Zhijun said Huawei will launch public cloud services in China in July 2015.

This launch will put Huawei in direct cloud service competition with Alibaba's Aliyun service. Microsoft and Amazon already launched their public cloud services in China, but those services will ultimately not be able to compete on a large scale because of their foreign investment structures.

Xu said Huawei wants to provide customers with a complete cloud service solution. Huawei can also provide related solutions to carriers while offering public cloud services. As for the overseas markets, Huawei will continue to cooperate with other carriers and provide public cloud solutions to them soon.

In March 2015, Huawei established a strategic partnership with Intel to jointly provide public cloud solutions to telecom operators around the world.

In January 2015, the market research firm IDC published a report on the Chinese public cloud service market which showed that the market scale of China's public cloud service reached USD327 million in the first half of 2014; and the market scale was expected to reach USD717 million for the entire year, representing a year-on-year increase of 46.7%. The report predicted that from 2015 to 2018, the public cloud service market will maintain fast growth and the annual average compound growth rate will reach 33.2%.

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Chinese B2C e-commerce provider JD.com formally launched its cross-border Internet shopping services, which allows Chinese users to conveniently purchase quality products from many countries and regions such as the U.S., France, U.K., and Japan.
This new platform will first offer over 150,000 kinds of products and 1,200 brands in 450 stores. Those products cover maternal and baby supplies, food and health products, personal care and cosmetics products, and apparel and shoes.

JD.com emphasized that this platform will not allow sale of fake goods. Once found selling fake goods, vendors would be charged a penalty of 20 times of their turnover or USD10,000.

JD.com said that the company will provide customized and personalized services to vendors who join this cross-border e-commerce platform. Vendors can autonomously select from JD's existing ports and supply chain partners. By reducing intermediate links, they can directly provide consumers with high-quality products and services.

In the logistics sector, JD will cooperate with large international third-party logistics companies to cover over 50 countries and regions around the world. In addition, JD will open three bonded zone ports in Ningbo, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou, respectively.

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Alibaba Pictures Group Limited, formerly known as ChinaVision Media Group Limited, announced that they have fully acquired Guangdong Yueke Software Engineering, an online solutions provide for the movie industry, for CNY830 million.
Yueke Software's 100% stake was previously on sale at Southern United Assets and Equity Exchange and the listed price was CNY180 million. Alibaba finally won the bidding for CNY830 million in cash.

Yueke Software's core businesses include movie ticket sales management, chain management, an e-ticket platform, mobile ticketing applications, third-party e-commerce platform access, and automatic display systems. Yueke Software has provided services to over 30 third-party cinema e-commerce operators in China.

With the popularization of online sales of tickets, the online seat selection market also saw rapid growth. Between 2010 and 2015, China's online seat selection market realized a compound growth rate of 198%. Industry watchers believed that China's large chain cinemas will all open the online seat selection functions in the future.

This is reportedly the second large-size capital transaction of Alibaba Pictures recently. Prior to this, the company received a capital injection suggestion from its controlling shareholder Alibaba Group. The report revealed that Alibaba Group intended to inject Taobao's film ticket business and related value-added service platform into Alibaba Pictures. The two parties are currently pushing forward relevant details.

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Chinese smartphone maker Meizu announced a strategic deal with mobile phone retail chain D.Phone that aims at annual sales of CNY2 billion.

Meizu revealed that its products will enter 3,000 D.Phone chain stores across China and the company will complete the building of 1,000 image sites within 2015. At the same time, Meizu will invest CNY400 million in post-sales improvement. Over the past three months, Meizu provided up to 100 training sessions to sales staff at D.Phone stores and a total of over 2,000 sales representatives attended the trainings.

Commenting on the cooperation, Li Nan, vice president of Meizu, said that the cooperation with D.Phone will help Meizu establish a sales channel to effectively cover all customer groups in a short time, realize full marketing, and provide faster and more thoughtful post-sales services. In the future, D.Phone's O2O channel will become another important strategic channel of Meizu.

Jin Xin, president of D.Phone, said that based on its offline advantages, D.Phone is building a ales process and experience combining online and offline resources. In addition, the company has a mature service system and hundreds of millions of consumers visit D.Phone stores to experience and purchase mobile phones each year.

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Chinese enterprise management software and e-business application solution provider Kingdee International Software Group has signed a global strategic cooperation agreement with Amazon Connect Technology Services (Beijing) Co., Ltd.

Under this global strategic cooperation agreement, the two parties will implement comprehensive and in-depth cooperation in various sectors, including enterprise resource planning, cloud service business transformation; product and technology innovation; automated operation and maintenance; user experience; international market service; and talent development. The cooperation is expected to help Kingdee establish a world-class ERP cloud service platform and accelerate the development of enterprise cloud computing market and the construction of a cloud computing ecosystem in China.

According to the terms of the agreement, Kingdee will become a core partner of Amazon AWS in the global cloud service sector. Amazon AWS will share its cloud computing technologies, methods, experience and knowledge with Kingdee and support Kingdee's building of ERP cloud service capacity.

In addition, the two parties will strive to further assist Chinese enterprises to expand cross-border e-commerce businesses and help them promote their businesses to the overseas market more easily.

Financial terms of the deal were not released.

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Foxconn will reportedly invest USD3.5 billion in India over the next two to three years.

According to a report in India's Business Standard, Foxconn executive Josh Fougler revealed that the company plans to invest USD3.5 billion in India in the next two to three years, covering smartphone, software, TV, and other electronic products.

In addition, The Economic Times in India quoted an insider by saying that Foxconn is considering building two smartphone product lines in Gujarat and Noida, respectively. Moreover, Foxconn will set up a small-scale trial product line in Sri City, Andhra Pradesh. The report said those product lines will make products for Apple; however, Hon Hai, parent company of Foxconn, did not provide any comment on the news.

Foxconn previously had three manufacturing plants in India which made mobile phones and related parts for Nokia. After Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia, Foxconn also closed those plants.

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Allegations against Chinese anti-virus company Qihoo 360 are doing little to quell fears about using Chinese security software.

At least three of the world's top testing laboratories — Virus Bulletin, AV-Comparatives and AV-Test Institute — have revoked certifications for Qihoo 360's products because of the cheating. The bodies stated that Qihoo 360 provided one set of results for certification, but then provided consumers a version of the software that had a "considerably lower level of protection".

For its part, Qihoo 360 says, " The allegation highlights that the default configuration of the product available for the public, differs from the configuration used by the labs for testing. This configuration was explicitly declared upon submission of the tests, and was thereafter confirmed by the test labs."

The company further states, "In the public version, 3rd party engine is off by default, in the consideration that the majority of our users, are running on lower computing power. To satisfy lab conditions, the consideration of power constraint was therefore discarded. In any case, no alleged comment indicates that the level of protection from the product, is lower than the records achieved during the testing sessions."

The provision of a less secure version of the software to consumers confirms suspicions by some China Internet watchers that Chinese security software companies purposely discount the efficacy of their solutions to give the Chinese government a softer means to penetrate users' computers. It also confirms worries that Chinese security companies may not always follow generally accepted global guidelines for testing and distributing software to netizens.
Qihoo 360 says it will continue to submit more data to the bodies in the hopes of regaining certification.

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Qualcomm is enhancing its relationship with Chinese businesses by launching a new unit to help Chinese smartphone manufacturers sell products in overseas markets.

About half of Qualcomm's revenue is reportedly from Chinese clients; however, the company still faces a series of challenges in the country. Prior to this, Qualcomm was punished for having monopoly in China. At the same time, the Chinese government is trying to lower their dependency on foreign chip manufacturers and other technology enterprises. To cope with this situation, Qualcomm hopes to prove their value to Chinese enterprises with the new seemingly-altruistic move.

According to Steve Mollenkopf, chief executive officer of Qualcomm, after the company paid their penalty in China, more and more Chinese clients showed their willingness to sign licensing agreements. As industrial giants like Apple and Samsung started using self-designed chips, revenue from Chinese smartphone makers became more important to Qualcomm. With the new move, Qualcomm wants to attract Chinese smartphone makers who aim to develop on the global stage, including Xiaomi and Huawei.

Jeff Lorbeck, vice president of Qualcomm China, told local Chinese media that the company previously opened a global office in Shenzhen that aimed to help Chinese smartphone makers explore the global marketplace. He said they are currently focusing on assisting Chinese clients to expand into overseas markets.

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Cyanogen will terminate its cooperation with OnePlus, a Chinese smartphone maker, and find a new hardware manufacturer partner.

Cyanogen's CEO Kirt McMaster and founder Steve Kondik reportedly made the announcement at a conference in Beijing.
As a result of this decision, the exclusive system dispute between OnePlus and MicroMax, a smartphone maker in India, will also end. In 2014, OnePlus launched a smartphone product named OnePlus One in India, which runs on Cyanogen OS customized system and was well received in the local market. However, MicroMax later claimed that they were the exclusive partner of Cyanogen in India and sued OnePlus, which led to the suspension of sales of the Chinese smartphone.

Kondik said that Cyanogen and OnePlus have different visions for software and the two parties have been arguing about it. Therefore, it is impossible for them to continue a cooperation.

Though terminating cooperation with OnePlus, Cyanogen said they will seek new partners in China and they prefer those who want to promote their products to the international market. The company did not reveal the name of their new partner, but it is reportedly a manufacturer focusing on the low-end phone sector.

Cyanogen is currently the largest third-party Android coding team in the world. Based on the Android system, its CyanogenMod ROM provides more personalized controlling options than many rivals.

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