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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