China Tech News

Alibaba Health Information Technology Limited, formerly known as CITIC 21CN Company Limited, has settled a legal dispute with Oracle.

Alibaba Health will pay about CNY37.2 million to Oracle for a licensing agreement for database management software signed in 2006. Meanwhile, the company will be refunded a deposit of USD11 million plus USD1.2 million in interest as part of the settlement.

In addition, Alibaba Health has moved its medicine regulatory network infrastructure from Oracle's database to its own cloud platform. In the future, Alibaba Health and Oracle will no long have a business relationship.

On May 30, 2006, the two parties signed an agreement, under which Oracle provided database management software, intermediate software, and related services to CITIC 21CN; in return, CITIC 21CN paid a deposit of USD11 million to Oracle. However, according to reports in Hong Kong media, CITIC 21CN already moved its database to Aliyun, Alibaba's cloud platform, in 2013. Alibaba acquired CITIC 21CN in March 2014.

In regards to financial impact of the incident, the report stated that Alibaba Health expects before-tax losses of about HKD34.1 million due to the disposal of the agreement.


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Following its recent partnership with Coolpad for smartphone development, Chinese Internet security software provider Qihoo 360 has now announced a new smart hardware joint venture project.

Qihoo 360 officially confirmed that the company will invest CNY200 million to establish a joint venture with Netcore that aims to explore the Internet smart router market.

Zhou Hongyi, founder of Qihoo 360, will be chairman of the new joint venture; while Lu Dong, senior vice president of Netcore, will be chief executive officer.

Commenting on the cooperation, Qihoo 360 said that Internet companies need to implement close cooperation with the manufacturing industry to create a full hardware and software ecosystem. Meanwhile, traditional companies can depend on the Internet companies to introduce smart, Internet, and cloud technologies into their products, so as to increase their profit.
In addition, Qihoo 360 announced that after 49 times of version optimizations, its new-generation router P1 will soon be launched.


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Japanese electronics company Panasonic reportedly plans to move its digital camera manufacturing from Japan to China in spring of 2015.

The company's production lines in Fukushima, Japan, will stop operation.

The Fukushima plant has an annual output of 1.5 million digital cameras, which is about half of the global sales of Panasonic. Due to the devaluation of the Japanese yen, Panasonic is considering moving parts of its large home appliances manufacturing back from China to Japan. However, in the digital camera sector, Panasonic continued to see losses attributing to the shrinking of the global market. Therefore, the company hopes to improve the situation via Chinese centralized production.

Prior to this, Panasonic said that the company would complete enterprise structure reforms within the 2014 financial year ended March 2015, and it is important for the company to revive the digital camera business.

In the 2013 financial year, Panasonic sold 3.24 million digital cameras, ranking sixth among manufacturers worldwide. However, the company saw operating losses over two consecutive years. By moving the digital camera production from Fukushima to the Xiamen plant, the company aims to improve cost competitiveness with centralized production.


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According to Angela Ahrendts, Apple's senior vice president of retail and online stores, the company plans to open five new retail stores in China before the Chinese Lunar New Year.

Its new store in Zhengzhou, Henan, has opened to customers and another new store in Hangzhou will be opened on January 24, 2015. Chinese Lunar New Year, otherwise known as Chun'jie, is a week-long holiday beginning on February 19, 2015.

With the opening of the five new stores, Apple will have 20 retail stores in mainland China. Statistics show that Apple currently has 448 retail stores around the world and over one million customers visit those stores each day. Of its owned stores, the Nanjing East store in Shanghai has the largest traffic with daily visits of over 25,000 visitors.

In 2014, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that they planned to increase the number of stores in China to 40 in two years.
Ahrendts said that the company's biggest challenge in China is to keep pace with the development. It is important to meet the increasing demands of consumers while ensuring the global unified service standards.


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Letv will soon launch its next-generation super TV product in China.

With the name of X55 Air, the new product will reportedly have a 55-inch display, full metal frame, and it will support 4K resolution. The product will be sold at about CNY5,000.

The X55 Air will adopt the similar production process with X60S; however, the new-generation product will feature a full metal frame, cloud-based software, a hardware configuration that can support more complex system operations, and optimized user interface.
For pricing, X55 Air may be sold at about CNY5,000, and it will still follow a charging policy of hardware prices plus content service fees.
Several upstream panel manufacturers, including Samsung, LGD, BOE, and CSOT, have started making 8.5 generation production lines in China. In 2015, China will reportedly become the country with the largest 8.5 generation production line LCD display production capacity, which also means that 55-inch TVs will become the mainstream in 2015.

Apart from Letv, other companies like Xiaomi and Skyworth will also release their 55-inch TV products soon.

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Alibaba will prevent Chinese vendors from selling children's products that are considered dangerous or illegal to American consumers.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has provided a list of up to 15 products which are considered illegal or have been recalled by manufacturers. Those products include baby seats and powerful magnets, and they are currently being sold on Alibaba to global buyers.

The CPSC has reached an agreement with Alibaba, whose e-commerce platforms will prevent the sales of prohibited children's toys to American users. However, these dangerous goods will still gladly be sold to Chinese and other buyers willing to take the risk.
Statistics from CPSC show that by value, about 90% toys in America were from China and every four out of five recalled products in the country were from abroad.

In 2014, Alibaba's e-commerce platforms boasted over 300 million active buyers. Though most buyers were from China, its consumer groups in America and other regions were also expanding.


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Chinese telecom device maker ZTE recently revealed that the company achieved operating revenue of CNY81.242 billion in 2014 — a year-on-year increase of 7.99% — and its net profit attributable to shareholders reached a year-on-year increase of 94.17%.
Meanwhile, the company reported that its operating profit was CNY104 million during the reporting period and its total profit was CNY3.629 billion, a year-one-year increase of 98.54%.

ZTE's operating revenue was CNY75.223 billion in 2013 and its net profit was CNY1.357 billion.

ZTE said that Chinese telecoms launched 4G services in 2014 and ZTE gained leading shares from the three major Chinese telecom operators. At the same time, the company's mobile phone terminal revenue realized over 40% growth in the third quarter of 2014, ranking fourth in the American market by market share.

ZTE previously predicted that the company's earnings for the entire year of 2014 would be between CNY2.5 billion and CNY2.8 billion, representing an increase of between 84.14% and 106.24%.

ZTE is expected to release a more detailed performance report on March 25, 2015.

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Chinese meal ordering platform Ele.me announced that the company has gained new investments of a whopping USD350 million and its investors including Tencent, JD.com, Dianping.com, Sequoia Capital, and CITIC Private Equity Funds.

According to Ele.me, after the financing the company will still maintain its independent operation and will implement strategic cooperation with its investors.

Zhang Xuhao, chief executive officer of Ele.me, said that in 2014 their platform completed 110 million orders and it accepted two million orders in a single day at peak time. Meanwhile, the company boasted 60% market share in China.

So far, the business of Ele.me has covered 250 cities across China, reaching 200,000 restaurants and 20 million users. Of its total transactions, over 75% were completed on mobile devices.

Zhang revealed that with the completion of the latest financing, Ele.me will aim at three major tasks. The company plans to optimize delivery services in colleges to enhance its position in the campus market; they will expand into the residential areas of white-collar workers; and they will focus on the establishment of an owned logistics system.


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Alibaba Health Information Technology Limited has signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with Shanghai Kingstar Winning Software to launch a range of e-medical services.

According to the agreement, the two parties will share resources and collaborate in medical services, health services, pharmaceutical distribution, regulation, and medical insurance risk control. Financial terms of the deal were not released.

For health services, the two parties will promote the unified management and services targeting chronic and common diseases both inside and outside hospitals. For medical services, they will jointly participate in the construction of cloud-based information systems for hospitals. This latter service would help to digitize patient data for storing on Alibaba's cloud computing platform
According to the companies, the entire payment platform and Winning's risk control engine will effectively improve and expand the value and position of their system in the health care payment system.

In addition, Alibaba Health and Winning Software will consider each other as strategic partners and the two parties will maintain the rights to pursue deeper cooperation in the future. Most importantly, they will inform each other in advance if seeking cooperation with third parties.

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Alibaba and its executives may feel the sting of American jurisprudence as law firms line up for possible class action lawsuits in the United States against the Chinese e-commerce company.

At least five law firms so far have expressed intentions to commence class actions against Alibaba.

For example, a complain from Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP charges Alibaba and certain of its officers and directors with violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The complaint alleges that during the class period, Defendants issued materially false and misleading statements regarding the soundness of company's business operations, the strength of its financial prospects and concealing substantial ongoing regulatory scrutiny.

Specifically, the complaint alleges that Alibaba failed to disclose that company executives had met with China's State Administration of Industry and Commerce in July 2014, just two months before Alibaba's initial public offering in the United States, and that regulators had then brought to Alibaba's attention a variety of highly dubious — and possibly illegal — business practices such as the selling of counterfeit goods.

In the IPO, Alibaba and certain "selling shareholders" sold more than 368 million ADSs at USD68 each. The complaint alleges that selling shareholders included two of Alibaba's co-founders, Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai, each of whom sold millions of shares. The complaint also alleges that Alibaba's ADSs continued trading at ever-increasing, artificially inflated prices.

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