Alibaba Group will buy a minority stake in search engine Sogou from Sohu.com. Sohu will sell a 16% stake in Sogou to Alibaba and a fund owned by Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma, and a separate 16% stake to a fund led by Sohu Chairman Charles Zhang. The deal is expected to help Alibaba expand in [...]
Temasek Holdings will invest $35 million in Tudou, China’s second-largest online video company, in the Singapore’s state investment company’s first foray into the Chinese internet sector. Tudou said that, including Temasek’s investment, it has raised $50 million in its latest round of equity financing. The funds will be used to prepare for an expected boost [...]
Google has decided to sever ties with two Chinese advertising agents out of the 25 with which it holds contracts nationwide. The two companies are Universal Internet Media and Xi’an Weihua Network. “The partnerships ended a couple of weeks ago because both sides felt there were no longer any mutual benefits,” a Google spokesperson said. [...]
China’s leading search engine Baidu announced on Tuesday that it will start hiring software engineers from the US early next month, signaling its ambitions to expand its technological capabilities and raise the company’s global profile. A Baidu spokesman said the company plans to hire 30 mid- to senior-level software engineers from Silicon Valley at a [...]
Google’s share of Chinese internet search revenue dropped to 30.9% in the first three months of the year from 35.6% in the last quarter of 2009, an indication of the commercial impact of the US firm’s fallout with Beijing. Google’s share had increased in all but two quarters since 2006. Local rival Baidu saw its [...]
Lenovo, the world’s fourth-largest personal computer maker, said it will release its first smart phone next month. The LePhone device will be based on Google’s Android operating system and will target the consumer market segment currently purchasing iPhones and Blackberry devices. “We are ready for a fight with the iPhone,” said Lenovo chairman Liu Chuanzhi. [...]
A Chinese government spokesman said yesterday that Google must comply with Chinese policies even if it closes its China operations. “On entering the Chinese market in 2007, [Google] clearly stated it would respect Chinese law,” said Yao Jian of the Ministry of Commerce. “If Google pulls out, it must still comply with Chinese law as [...]
Google is likely to take action to close the main portion of its China operation within weeks, according to an anonymous source familiar with the situation. The news follows the apparent failure of negotiations to allow Google.cn to both remain in China and stop censoring search results. Last Friday Li Yizhong, minister of Industry and [...]
A Beijing court has ordered two Chinese kettle manufacturers to pay US$1.3 million (RMB9.1 million) in damages to a UK company over patent infringements. The No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court ruled that Zhejiang Jiatai Electrical Appliance Manufacture and Leqing FaDa Electrical Appliance had sold electric kettle controls based on technology developed by Strix, a British [...]
In a major setback for record companies’ intellectual property rights, China’s largest internet search engine Baidu, as well as smaller Sogou, have been cleared of internet piracy charges by a Beijing court. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) estimates that 99% of music in China is now downloaded from the internet. “The verdicts [...]
