The New York Times has an interesting article today on thriving state-owned companies in China-”China’s Policies Ensure State Enterprises Grow“. The article makes no mention of China’s Internet industry, which will generate 6-7+ billion dollars in revenue this year from gaming, advertising and other sources, is growing 20% or more per year, and which has [...]
On Monday evening SIG analyst Zhao Chunming downgraded Tencent from positive to neutral over concerns about its valuation in the face of a slowdown in the Chinese online game market. 48% of Tencent’s revenue comes from online gaming, and in the last several weeks Perfect World, Shanda Games, Giant Interactive and Netease have all issued [...]
Zynga is doing more than just opening a Beijing office, they have bought XPD Media-Zynga Enters Asia With Acquisition Of Gaming Startup XPD Media; Opens Office In Beijing. Congrats to Robin Chan, Andy Tian and the XPD team. Now I know why they are leasing so much space. All I can say Robin is if [...]
UPDATE2: Zynga Acquires XPD Media; Opens Office In Beijing. Today Zynga posted three jobs on Craigslist Beijing: [UPDATE:These job listings appear to have been deleted from Craigslist. The links go to copies of the original postings. Strange that Zynga would post and then delete these, unless they jumped the gun on a more substantive announcement/partnership [...]
In today’s Q1 2010 earnings release Perfect World announced today that it has acquired a majority stake in Runic Games, a Seattle-based game development studio. Perfect World, which already has a deal to publish an MMORPG version of Runic’s “Torchlight“, says it paid “consideration of approximately US$8.4 million” for the majority stake. From Perfect World’s [...]
There is a report in the Chinese press that Netease is in talks to buy into Microsoft’s MSN China joint venture by purchasing the 50% share owned by the current Chinese partner. MSN China is a joint venture that was established in 2005 between Microsoft and Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd. (SAIL). This report is unconfirmed and [...]
The Machinima film ”网瘾战争 War of Internet Addiction” won top prize at the 2010 Tudou Festival, as Tudou co-founder Marc van der Chijs describes on his blog. Congratulations to 性感玉米 SexyCorn ( @CorndogCN on twitter) and his team for making such a good and important film. You can see it on Tudou below, or watch an English subtitled version [...]
I wrote a guest post for GigaOm Pro on why it is so hard for most US Internet firms to succeed in China. GigaOm Pro is $79/yr, and after spending a couple of weeks using it I’d say it is well worth the very reasonable price. GigaOm excerpted my post on its free site, which [...]
By now we are all familiar with the concept of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) as four nations whose “combined economies could eclipse the combined economies of the current richest countries of the world” by 2050. Today China’s largest Internet firm Tencent announced a $300m investment into Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies Limited (DST). DST is the [...]
The China Social Game Summit 2010 was packed, and Rockyou, a sponsor, was one of the stars of the conference. Jia Shen (沈佳), co-founder and CTO of Rockyou, gave an excellent presentation in Chinese to a standing room only crowd of Chinese developers. He not only introduced his company but also gave a very informative talk [...]
Items of Interest