China Tech News

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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