Tencent wins third suit against Qihoo 360
Tencent, China's biggest Internet company, has won its third lawsuit against Qihoo 360, a leading Chinese antivirus software developer, over the latter's unfair competition, notes chinadaily.com. Qihoo 360 was accused of breaching faithfulness as well as equal competition and was obvious in malicious competition against Tencent, according to Guangdong Provincial High People's Court ruling. The antivirus software developer was fined 5 million yuan ($802,568) as compensation to Tencent, this being the highest compensation sum that has ever been ordered in Internet competition lawsuits in China.
Source: chinadaily.com
Baidu Reaches 100 Million Daily Mobile Search Users
China’s search engine giant Baidu released its Q1 2013 earning showing that a major milestone was reached as daily mobile search users counted 100 million for the first time ever. This is in addition to over 80 million collective users of its mobile apps, such as the Google Maps-beating Baidu Maps app. In terms of numbers quarterly revenues went up 40% from the same period in 2012, that is US $961 million and operating profits went up 5.7 percent from Q1 2012 ($355.9 million).
Source: techinasia.com
200 Million Broadband Subscribers But Mobile Is Still King
Today, China counts more than 180 million broadband subscribers and the number continues to grow, according to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). Even if the growth of broadband internet is impressive, the report points out that China has actually skipped broadband and moved straight on to mobile with more than 1.1 billion mobile subscribers and over 200 million of them on 3G.
Source: techinasia.com
What’s next for China’s Online Luxury Market ?
In the first half of 2012, China’s online luxury market was worth 13.5 billion yuan, up 58 percent year-on-year, according to statistics by China e-Business Research Center. Specialists predict that China’s online luxury market will keep growing dramatically and could be worth as much as 23.76 billion yuan by the end of 2013. iResearch states that the figure may reach 37.24 billion yuan by 2015. One of the main advantages is that online retailers are not facing the geographical restrictions that their brick-and-mortar counterparts do. On the other side, online retailer need to be patient, since getting consumers used to shopping for luxury goods online is a long process.
Source: china.org.cn
How Many Users Can You Really Reach On Sina Weibo
Even if Sina claimed that Weibo reached 503 million registered users buy the end of 2012, a study conducted by researchers at Hong Kong University states that
57% of users never posted anything on Sina Weibo (220 million users). The study that use a ramdom sample of 30,000 users suggests that only around 30 million users
will write a unique post in a given week and 86.9% of users wrote no original posts. Another interesting finding from the study is that Beijing, Shanghai, and the province of Guangdong,
which account for 9% of China’s Internet population, were home to more than a quarter of the 12,000 Weibo users they studied.
Source: chinainternetwatch.com