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Yahoo raises the stakes in China
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-12-22 10:30

Yahoo plans to offer China's 27 million broadband subscribers the company's first service to combine mail and instant messaging as it tries to win market share in the nation at the end of this month will

Yahoo Mail Messenger service will allow users to access instant messaging for free through their mailbox service with only one or two clicks, compared with the seven or eight previously needed, the company said.

Users also can send instant messages without having to download four or five megabytes of software, the company said.

Yahoo is competing with its U.S. rival Google and local portals such as Sina and Netease.com for market share in China. The nation has an estimated 87 million Internet users and is second to the United States in terms of subscribers, Barron's said in May, citing a Morgan Stanley analyst, Mary Meeker. China may become the biggest market within five years.

In November 2003, Yahoo acquired 3721 Network Software, China's leading Chinese-keyword search engine at the time, for $120 million. Zhou Hongyi, the company's founding president, was retained as head of operations in China.

This year Zhou has introduced products including www.yisou.com, a Chinese search engine that competes with the market leader Baidu.com. With Sina, Zhou jointly developed the online auction site www.1pai.com, which is taking on eBay in China.
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"We also started in July a free mail service that gives users one gigabyte of storage - 10 times more storage size than before and four times what is offered for free in the U.S.," Zhou said. The move prompted Sina and Netease.com in November both to release a free mail service that allows 1.5 gigabytes of storage.
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"Our move garnered us millions of new users," said Zhou. He refused to divulge the size of Yahoo's active user base. "Yahoo's rules don't allow us to give exact numbers, but I can say we now have tens of millions of users," he said.
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Yahoo's 3721 is the No. 1 Chinese-keyword search engine, with 40 percent market share in terms of revenue, according to Analysys Consulting.

 



 
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