The news that Google Inc's potential withdrawal from China, over the censorship in China and the hacker's attack on GMail accounts for Chinese human right activists, sent shock waves not only in the investors world, it is also a hot topic that concerns a lot of Internet users worldwide as well as the players in the IT industry.
The mass Internet users in general supported the move by Google to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the gmail accounts as well as the Internet freedom.
However for some, this appears to be a calculated economic decision for the company. The operation in China contributes only less than 5% of the company sales. Based on the Sept 09 report on search activity from Comscore, Google Sites was the top search destination in Asia Pacific Region, accounting for 44.1% share of all searches in the region. However when drilled down the statistics by individual country, Baidu.com Inc. led as China's top search destination with 63% share of searches performed. Therefore the withdrawal does not seem to be fatal for the company in the short term as its market share is not that significant in China at the moment.
There was also conspiracy theory especially from China that the US is behind Google, engineering all this and this event is more of the political game in between US-China rather than a sole corporate decision.
Based on the research report from Comscore for internet population aged 15+ accessed the internet from a home or work location, China, home to the largest Internet population in the world, experienced a 31% increase to 220.8 million in a year from Sept 08 to Sept 09, making it the fastest-growing Internet country in the region. The long term effect for permanent withdrawal from China market is therefore unwise for any Internet company. I would rather think this event is just a tactic for the company to have a better position in the negotiation with China for more freedom in its operation in China. Let's wait and see how the story progress in Feb 09, after Chinese New Year.
No comments:
Post a Comment