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Mainland, Taiwan Net firms eye each other

By Liu Baijia (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-08-01 08:47

At the same time, ezTravel also wants a bigger share of customers in Taiwan to book hotels and air tickets through Ctrip, as well as Ctrip providing a stable future source of tourists.

Senior Internet analyst Lu Bowang said the four-firm co-operation could start a new wave of Taiwanese companies to the mainland, eager to benefit from the rapid growth of the Internet market.

So far there have been two such waves one in 2000 and 2001, when Chinese Internet portals were publicly listed on the NASDAQ exchange in New York, catching the eyes of many overseas investors. The other came in 2003 and 2004, when computer game developers came to the mainland, where online gaming was becoming a huge success.

"The charm of the Internet market in the Chinese mainland is hard to ignore," said Lu.

The mainland has the second- largest Internet population after the United States and the largest population of people under 35 years old.

And mainland Internet companies such as Ctrip, online game operator NetEase and search engine Baidu have been bright stars on the NASDAQ.

Ben Tsiang, senior vice-president of Sina Corp, who was one of the founders of Sina's business in Taiwan almost 10 years ago, said it was natural for companies from Taiwan to look for opportunities in the mainland's Internet market.

"You can easily tell who your competitors are and how big the market is in Taiwan, because it is so small, compared with the mainland," said Tsiang.

Jimmy Yiu, chairman of eDynamics, said the competition between US online auction giant eBay's Chinese arm and Taobao.com, now partly held by Yahoo!, greatly stimulated people's interest in online trading.

He said prosperity in online trading usually followed the growth of online bidding, so the stiff competition between auction houses signalled that it was a good time for Internet companies to come to the mainland.

"If we do not come at this time, we may miss the opportunity," said Yiu.