Yu Yongfu, UCWEB CEO revealed they would have deep cooperations with Alibaba Group companies in the future, and add high-reliability electronic commerce services in the browser. Relevant person in charge of UCWEB said that under an agreement signed by both parties, UCWEB management team is still to maintain absolute control, Alibaba will not take part in the operation and management of UCWEB.

Morningside investment, CEYUAN in 2007 invested in UCWEB, investors from both sides said, additional investment was made because the future development of UCWEB looked promising. Alibaba CEO Jack Ma stressed that the Alibaba Group was convinced that the mobile Internet had a incalculable prospect.

UCWEB browser is a domestic phone market leader, the former Kingsoft CEO Lei Jun is the company’s investors and board chairman. According to its public information, UCWEB owns more than 70 million users. Repeatedly said by Lei Jun, UCWEB was expected to be the Google of China.

The project is currently still in negotiation stage, the amount of money involved may be several million dollars.

News source from the investment community told Sina science and technology, Alibaba Group’s investment companies had launched numerous contacts with UCWEB, intending to inject a strategic investment to the latter. As the project is still in negotiation,the investment details have yet to be finalized.
　　
April 13, Alibaba Group confirmed the formal establishment of an investment management company, the company will focus on the secondary market for investment, in management of more than 2 billion U.S. dollars cash, former CEO of Libra Capital is in charge.

UCWEB is a leader in domestic phone browser market. The former Kingsoft CEO Lei Jun is the company’s investors and board chairman. According to its public information, UCWEB owns more than 70 million users. Repeatedly said Lei Jun, UCWEB might be able to create the Google of China.

The industry believes that this strategic investment can help the two sides respectively: the Alibaba Group, through such a deep cooperation, gains the opportunity to promote its Taobao on UCWEB, and UCWEB can have funds added, as well as assistance from the resources of Alibaba Group to enhance their mobile phone browser market competitiveness.

This afternoon, Alibaba claimed they had not heard the news, UCWEB expressed lack in this knowledge.

The new Google Kingsoft Powerword features some improvement on Kingsoft’s original Powerword. Google has added a webpage translation for the software and added Google network paraphrase dictionary and Google picture dictionary in addition to integrating the online community Aiciba’s encyclopedia to it. The software is 20 megabytes in size, providing 14 million word listings, 800,000 example sentences and 300,000 voice recordings.

Google and Kingsoft are now mainly cooperating on technology and products, but neither of them has disclosed the funds involved in their cooperation.

Kingsoft previously launched the Baidu Safety Center with Google’s Chinese rival Baidu.com and also spent RMB10 million setting up a games joint venture business with Alchemy in China.

Source : Chinatechnews

The newly launched BSC is said to offer security ratings for systems in a way similar to Vista scoring to remind users of conducting necessary operations to kill viruses or upgrade their computer, as well as to provide online security services to them.

The parties have not considered a profit-making pattern for the new service, but they say that they won’t charge a fee from users. In November 2006, Kingsoft cooperated with Baidu on launching shadu.baidu.com, which was one of the first third-party anti-virus platforms in China.

Source : Chinatechnews

According to data from iResearch’s ‘Online Game Quarterly Report Q2, 2007′, the market size for online game was 2.65 billion and the biggest 5 companies’ income accounts for 72.6% of the market. Now there’re about 150 companies in online game industry in China, with 5 million revenues a quarter on average. Although the situation is grim, opportunity still exists. Compare with more than 10 million netizens, there’re only 100 million online game users, so online game market has great potential.

Since there’re for Kingsoft in the field of application software and Kingsoft has successfully developed and launched JX online series, iResearch believe that developing online game business is the best choice for Kingsoft.

Kingsoft doesn’t form a core competitiveness in online game yet

According to Kingsoft operation and products, iResearch believes that Kingsoft is strong in innovation and research and development capabilities while weak in operation capability. Kingsoft once said that they would learn from Nintendo to develop popular games and attract users do not play games. With this concept, Kingsoft launched CO online which was easy to operate and became a successful game for new players. But the game lacks of core competitiveness to attract players to stay. Unengaging tasks and boring conversations make the game a common one.

Although quality is a flaw for Kingsoft’s development, but the biggest constraints is its operation capability. iResearch advised that strengthen operation team is the first problem to be solved after IPO.

IPO provides fund for expanding R&D team

Kingsoft said that fund will be used for software personnel recruitment and strategic acquisitions after IPO. Considered of experience and profit, online game will still be the core business after IPO, but the research love knot and lack of operation capability restricted Kingsoft. So iResearch believes that the fund from IPO will be used to game development and the possibility of buying games is rare.

To sum up, Kingsoft is transferring to game operation company from a software company. From business and income distribution structure, online game business is important to Kingsoft. To some extent, without online game business, Kingsoft would not IPO successfully.

Kingsoft will focus on online game business after IPO. In the fierce competing industry, Kingsoft is not in inferior position in technology. iResearch advises Kingsoft to strengthen its operation team building and marketing service to form 2-3 core products.