Last Monday Google revealed that it had acquired a decent stake in a Chinese community website. The Chinese community site Tianya.cn is the biggest in China! One of Google’ spokeswoman confirmed the stake holding by email to CNN, but declined to give any further details.
Different local media reports on Monday and Tuesday said the size of Google’s stake in Tianya.cn was between 10 to 60 percent. Other media reports said Google may be buying more companies or stakes in Chinese internet companies.
One of Google’s biggest concerns is close the gap with their biggest rival Baidu.com, which dominated the Chinese search market in the second quarter of 2007 with 58.1 percent share! Google is at the second place with 22.8 percent share and Yahoo! is doing well with their third spot with 11.6 percent share.
China is a very interesting internet market. They are the world’s second largest internet market after the United States, with around 162 million web users. Since Google bought YouTube for 1.65 billion last year, venture capital investment in Chinese social networking sites has exploded! I think we can expect more news about investments in China soon.
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August 22nd, 2007 at 4:53 pm
China is a very interesting market, especially with so much censorship. Sometimes I really wonder how Google manages to make a profit there.
August 22nd, 2007 at 6:43 pm
yeah, big market, lot of opportunities !!
August 22nd, 2007 at 8:29 pm
haha good old google they will dominate the world one day…
August 23rd, 2007 at 3:17 am
Nice article Nomar. In addition, I like India because it is a few years behind China but is an English speaking market. Makes it easier for us English speakers.
August 23rd, 2007 at 4:03 am
Congrats to Google and acquiring tianya. I don’t know exactly what the site is since it’s all in Chinese, but I’m sure they made a great move
-Gregg
August 23rd, 2007 at 5:53 am
Google has to keep acquiring to keep ahead of the others. Soon they’ll be moving to other markets also
August 25th, 2007 at 2:35 am
China is one of the biggest markets in the world. For google is imperative to begin a domination in that market. Google will do it, and in 1-3 years google will finally dominate china.
After that what will we say? GOOGLE OWNS THE WORLD!
August 27th, 2007 at 4:52 am
BIGGER!!!!!! you kidding me!?
September 4th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
[...] is no doubt that right now, in mid-2007, Google is the premier company in the world. It buys all of the best minds, it drives them to keep making the impossible, possible, it grows [...]