Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Online market in China

Online gaming, chatting, employment and shopping are more and more popular in China. Taking online shopping as an example: Online Chinese shoppers spent 16.2 billion yuan (2.3 billion U.S. dollars) in 19 major cities in the first half of 2008, based on a survey carried out in several cities-- Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing, Changchun, etc.

The C2C site Taobao.com, a subsidiary of online portal Alibaba.com in which Yahoo! invested 1 billion U.S. dollars in 2005, was the nation's dominant Internet retailer. It had an online shopping penetration rate of 81.5 percent and 91 percent of online shoppers who had heard of Taobao had made purchases at the site.

Dangdang.com was second with 16.6 percent, followed by Joyo, Amazon's China subsidiary, with 13.6 percent. Eachnet, owned by Tom Online and eBay, had 8.4 percent, while Tencent's C2C site Paipai.com was 7.2 percent.

Facts and figures for the future of online businesses in China show really positive signs. However, the question is that there are not many foreign companies enter the market, except of partnership with local firms. It all comes down to cultural barriers that make the communication a problem. How can foreign companies get the "bank" to cash in their millions is still an open question.

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