China Tech News

Nokia's chief executive officer Rajeev Suri has confirmed that after the company's licensing agreement with Microsoft expires in 2016, Nokia will return to the smartphone market.

As part of this transition, Foxconn will make Nokia's first Android smartphone, which will be first released in China, India, and some European countries. Foxconn is a Taiwan-based original equipment manufacturer and already produces many Apple iPhone components.

At present, Foxconn makes N1 tablets for Nokia. This product is reportedly the first product developed by the technical department of Nokia. N1 has been launched in the Chinese mainland and Taiwan and is reportedly well received by consumers. Nokia plans to make it available in more markets in the future.

In regards to its first Android smartphone, Nokia plans to launch a global marketing campaign for it before the end of 2015 and will launch an official product website then.

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Who said only Ctrip and eLong ruled the Chinese Internet travel world?

LY.com, one of China's many privately-run travel booking websites, announced that they have gained over CNY6 billion new investments from Wanda Culture Industry Group, Tencent Industry Win-Win Fund, and CITIC Capital.

As the lead investor, Wanda Culture Industry Group invested CNY3.58 billion in the tourism website.

For many years, investors in publicly-traded Chinese travel websites like Ctrip.com and eLong.com have assumed they had a large piece of China's Internet travel market. But with investments in LY.com, the recent IPO of Qunar.com, the expansion of B2B travel opportunities with 51MICE.com and millions of dollars worth of revenue flowing through dozens of other large travel websites, investors are waking up to the very large opportunity in China's travel sector.

Founded in 2004, LY.com already claims to have served about 30 million users in 2014, representing a growth of 100%. With the investment, Wanda Culture Industry Group and LY.com will begin a comprehensive strategic cooperation. Wanda's tourism business will be able to access online channels to gain customer resources, and LY.com will gain tourism destination resources and increase its trading volume.

Wang Jianlin, chairman of Wanda Group, said that by investing in LY.com, Wanda's tourism business will form a triumvirate structure, including a powerful online platform, an offline channel, and and large tourism destinations.

Wu Zhixiang, founder and CEO of LY.com, said that LY.com will begin its priority cooperation with Wanda's travel agencies, culture tourism cities, and offline business resources. In the future, the company will enhance investments in brand, mobile, research and development, big data, and market expansion.

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China Telecom chairman Wang Xiaochu revealed the company's VoLTE development route and stated that China Telecom plans to raise its 4G network coverage to the level of 3G networks and realize the commercial use of VoLTE before 2018.

VoLTE – Voice over LTE – is an IP data transmission technology that delivers high-speed data service and high-quality voice and video communications.

According to Wang, who made the comments during the 7th Smart Terminal and Mobile Internet Industry Summit, China

Telecom will implement VoLTE technical testing and verification in 2015.

The company will implement large-scale network construction and start testing and adjustment in various sectors, including chips, terminals, network coverage, business services, intercommunications, and information technology, by 2016; and it will realize full commercial use of VoLTE by the end of 2017.

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Lenovo Mobile Business Group is ramping up for heightened China competition after its recent Motorola Mobility acquisition with a reorganization of he company's sales structure.

Yang Jun will replace Zhang Hui to lead mobile phone sales in China and Yang will be promoted to vice president of Lenovo Group. Meanwhile, Ye Zhuliang, head of overseas sales of Lenovo Mobile Business Group, will also be promoted to vice president of Lenovo Group and oversee mobile phone sales in Asia Pacific..

Yang previously worked as product operation and Internet business general manager for the Lenovo Mobile Business Group China region. He once drove the launch of Lenovo's Lemo series phones.

Lenovo did not disclose the new appointment for Zhang Hui. Zhang was appointed Lenovo Group's vice president and MBG China mobile business general manager on March 11, 2014, replacing Feng Xing.

new adjustments aim to integrate the existing sales teams of Lenovo and Motorola. After acquiring Motorola Mobility, Lenovo and Motorola's mobile businesses have been operating independently.

The sales executives involved in the adjustments will be responsible for the sales of both Lenovo and Motorola brands in their respective markets, and they will directly report to Chen Xudong.

Chen assumed positions as Lenovo Group executive vice president, MBG president, and Motorola Mobility management committee president on June 1, 2015.


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Taiwanese PC maker Asus published its operating revenue statistics for the second quarter of 2015, stating that the company's operating revenue was NTD108.403 billion, which was about CNY21.69 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of 3.05% and a decrease of 3.12% compared with the first quarter of 2015.

Meanwhile, Asus revealed that its operating revenue in June 2015 was NTD41.68 billion, a year-on-year increase of 22.91% and an increase of 23.75% compared with the NTD33.682 billion operating revenue in May 2015.

In addition, affected by the decrease of demands for PCs around the world, Asus announced plans to lower its laptop shipments for 2015 from the original 22.8 million units to 20 million units, marking a decrease rate of about 12.3%. The company's laptop shipment in 2014 was 20.3 million units.

However, the company's mobile phone shipments for 2015 will be maintained at between 17 million and 25 million units.


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The freshly-minted Hong Kong-based mobile operating system company Acadine Technologies is hoping to make room for itself among the ubiquitous of Android and iOS devices.

The company says it received USD100 million in its first round financing from China-based Tsinghua Unigroup International.
Acadine is so new, that only yesterday, July 15, did it register and incorporate at least three of its shell and operational companies in Hong Kong: Acadine Group Holdings Limited, Acadine Labs Holdings Limited, and Acadine Software Holdings Limited. A fourth company, Acadine Technologies Holdings Limited, was incorporated in Hong Kong in March 2015.

Acadine's core product is a mobile operating system called H5OS, which is based on HTML5. Interestingly, facebook and other companies have sent signals recently that they will dump HTML5 and instead use native app technologies for mobile users, so this H5OS operating system's ability to gain traction overseas may be limited if HTML5 is removed from the world's largest social network.

H5OS is a completely web-centric operating system and eliminates the native APIs that give the conventional mobile OS owners full business control over other mobile industry participants
Acadine Technologies is based in Hong Kong, with operations in Beijing, Taipei, Palo Alto, and London.

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Huawei is ready to battle Alibaba's Aliyun cloud service as Huawei plans to hold a launch event at the end of July 2015 to officially release its own public cloud computing services.

Huawei's rotating CEO and vice chairman Xu Zhijun disclosed in April that the company would soon launch its public cloud services to formally enter the Chinese information service industry, and now local Chinese media are confirming that the commencement will happen within two weeks.

Xu said in April that Huawei wants to provide customers with a complete cloud service solution. Huawei will also provide related solutions to carriers; meanwhile, the company will continue to cooperate with other carriers in the overseas market and provide public cloud solutions to them.

At the end of 2010, Huawei launched a cloud computing strategy named "Yunfan" and announced its formal entry into the cloud computing sector. In October 2011, Huawei announced the establishment of an IT product line focused on cloud computing. In 2014, the company launched its Fusion Sphere 5.0 cloud operating system. Then with nearly four years of development, Huawei launched a series of products and solutions based on cloud computing and it accumulated users in various sectors, including server services, storage solutions, and distributed cloud data centers. Huawei currently has over 400 data centers across the world, including 120 cloud data centers.

For the year of 2015, Huawei signed a cloud computing strategic cooperation agreement with Centrin Data Systems in May; on June 15, Deutsche Telekom announced intentions to select Huawei as its public cloud strategy partner; on June 16, Huawei signed a cloud computing strategic cooperation agreement with the municipal government of Dalian in
northeastern China to jointly build a software cloud service platform.

Huawei's public cloud services will focus first on the IaaS sector. Its target customers will be industries that are impacted by the Internet and willing to transform to the cloud service sector such as finance, government, manufacturing, energy, and education.

Alibaba's Aliyun service launched more than two years ago and has quickly built both a brand an a ubiquitous service around China. In addition, China's laws limit foreign players in the cloud computing sector, so companies like Amazon and Rackspace are greatly limited in seizing any sizable piece of the market in China.

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After two years and three months of operation, NetEase cloud music announced that their number of users had exceeded 100 million.

By July 2015, NetEase cloud music has reached seven major platforms, covering the iPhone, Android phones, Web browsers, and PC-based software.

NetEase cloud music currently has included 1,200 stars and five million songs, and the number of lists created by users has reached over 64 million. In addition, about 120 million music comments and 200 million sharing were generated on its platform.

Wang Lei, senior director of NetEase cloud music, said that with over 100 million users, NetEase cloud music plans to establish a music playground to provide users with more experiences.

At the same time, NetEase cloud music announced that they will hold an annual music festival on August 11. With popular stars from Korea and China, the music festival will broadcast live on NetEase cloud music.

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China's Inspur will invest CNY10 billion to distribute cloud computing data centers across the entire country.

Inspur said that with solutions for the secure cloud, industrial cloud, and service cloud, Inspur will provide comprehensive cloud services to regional governments, industrial companies, and large enterprises.
Inspur further revealed that the CNY10 billion investment will be used to build seven core cloud computing data centers and 50 regional cloud computing centers in China.

So far, two of its seven core cloud computing data centers, which are located in Beijing and Jinan, have been completed; and the other five will be located in Shanghai, South China, Southwest China, North China, and Northeast China.

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Kingsoft Cloud has reached a deal with HP to provide medical, banking, and gaming industry customers with platform and application services based on private and mixed clouds.

As both companies have private cloud businesses in China, Zhang Hongjiang, chief executive officer of Kingsoft, said HP has a deep understanding of the Chinese market. When launching cloud services in the country, HP needs a better Chinese partner though, so the deal will expand HP's ability to offer legal services in the country. Financial terms of the deal were not released.

Zhang said China's cloud computing market is experiencing explosive growth and more traditional industries are considering moving their IT structures to cloud platforms. Taking the mobile game industry as an example, all major mobile game operators have applied cloud computing services tp their offerings and delivery networks.

He pointed out that the cooperation between Kingsoft Cloud and HP will be a win-win cooperation. Both Kingsoft Cloud and HP have their respective customers and channels. In addition, with the development of their cloud service scale, they will be able to purchase more hardware at better prices.

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