China Tech News

Sad news for technology watchers during the Golden Week holiday: tech startup and former editor Zhang Rui has passed away.
Zhang was ironically co-founder of Chinese healthcare mobile app Spring Rain Doctors, and previously an editor at Netease and a Beijing newspaper.

The Beijing-based mobile healthcare app maker backed by China International Capital Corporation Limited and other investors just completed a RMB1.2 billion pre-IPO round and is preparing for an initial public offering.

Entrepreneurs have expressed shock on Weibo and WeChat in the past two days as the sad news spread of his heart attack.
Spring Rain Doctors has 29 million active users and is one of the largest healthcare mobile apps in China.

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Xuele, a K-12 online education platform in China, has closed its series C financing round.
Specific numbers on the round have not been clearly provided, but GSR Ventures' involvement in the round is reportedly worth tens of million of U.S. dollars.

GSR Ventures previously invested in Xuexibao.cn, a similar K-12 online education platform that helps students do homework and provides online tutoring.

Founded in 2002, Xuele operates Xuelecn.com and provides online study materials closely linked to students' curriculum. The platform provides basic services for free but sells advertising and charges fees for personalized education services.

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Foxconn has deployed 40,000 robots in its factories in mainland China as it aims to reduce the number of workers …

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Chinese mobile Internet services provider NetQin announced appointments of Guo Lingyun and Zhu Yan as directors of the company.
The board of directors of NetQin also established an investment committee, which will be responsible for the company's investment transaction, management, policy, and guideline. Shi Wenyong, chairman of NetQin, is the chairman of this investment committee and the members include Ethan Hu and Zhu Yan.

Guo has been NetQin's chief strategy officer since July 2015. Before joining NetQin, he worked for companies such as Nortel Networks China and Ericsson China. Guo gained a master's degree at Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications.
Zhu is chairman of Zhongzhi Gaoke and has 14 years of experience in the investment consulting and management sector. Before joining Zhongzhi Gaoke, she worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers and Cowen and Company. Zhu gained a master's degree at Macquarie University, Australia.

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Chinese smartphone brand Vivo and NBA formally announced that the two parties have reached a multi-year strategic cooperation for Vivo to become the NBA's exclusive official partner in the smartphone market in China.

Mark Tatum, vice chairman of NBA, said that as NBA's exclusive smartphone partner in China, Vivo will not only develop basketball and sports along with the NBA, but also will offer more NBA games to basketball fans to make Vivo smartphones more fun.

During the strategic cooperation conference, NBA representatives gave a signature basketball with logos of both parties to Vivo as a gift. In return, Vivo's vice president Ni Xudong gave NBA a Vivo X7 smartphone with logos of both parties.
Over the next few years, Vivo will support NBA to hold a series of brand activities in China, including an NBA international series, an NBA Chinese New Year activity, and NBA fans days.

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Chinese telecommunications device maker Huawei will build an innovation experience center in Lagos, Nigeria.

The Chinese company will train information and communications technology talents for this country as it invests USD6 million in this project.
As the first innovation experience center in West Africa, Huawei's new project will allow people to access the most cutting-edge technologies in the world and explore business solutions via innovation. This center will also provide a mutual beneficial platform for the development of information and communications technology ecosystem.

With an area of about 500 square meters, Huawei's innovation experience center will apply cloud technologies to enable the sharing of global resources of Huawei in Africa.

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Taiwan-based semiconductor firm MediaTek announced that the company plans to triple the number of its Indian employees from the current 500 to 1,500 over the next three years.

The Taiwanese company will expand its research and development and customer service operations in India.

At present, MediaTek has about 12,000 employees around the world. Tsai Ming-kai, chairman of MediaTek, said that before the end of 2016, MediaTek will hire 50 Indian engineers in Taiwan, which will be a part of its smartphone design training cooperation program.
Tsai said that MediaTek is committed to developing made-in-India products. He predicted that MediaTek's smartphone market share in India would increase from 35% in 2007 to about 70%.

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Taiwanese semiconductor company TSMC says it realized combined operating revenue of about NTD260.41 billion as it announced its financial report for the third quarter of 2016 and performance expectations for the fourth quarter of 2016.

According to the financial report, TSMC realized combined operating revenue of about NTD260.41 billion, which was about CNY55.15 billion, and it represented a year-on-year increase of 22.5% and an increase of 17.4% compared with the previous quarter. TSMC's net profit after tax was about NTD96.706 billion, which was about CNY20.48 billion, and it represented a year-on-year increase of 28.4% and an increase of 33.4% compared with the previous quarter.

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Google and Facebook are blocked in China, but that hasn't stopped the American companies from partnering with Chinese companies to build a data connectivity across the Pacific Ocean.



Google and Facebook will cooperate with Pacific Light Data Communication to jointly build a submarine cable with the speed of 120 Tbps per second to connect Los Angeles and Hong Kong.

Pacific Light Data Communication is a fully-owned subsidiary of China Soft Power Technology and it is a new player in the submarine cable sector.

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The maker of an all-terrain robot that mimics the movements of a spider has closed a US$6 million series A financing round in Beijing.
GGV Capital led the series A financing round in Vincross, a Beijing-based robotics start-up, ahead of the company's launch of its first product, an all-terrain six-legged robot spider called HEXA.



Existing investor Zhen Fund also participated in the round, which the company says it will use for recruitment and research.
Vincross's founder and CEO, Sun Tianqi, has extensive experience in robotics and artificial intelligence. Before starting Vincross, Tianqi worked as an AI scientist at Tsinghua University, where he conducted research on neural modeling and neural networks. And he previously worked at Microsoft Research Asia.


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