Yahoo! decides to close its Chinese mail service
Yahoo! has decided its Chinese customers don't need their email
accounts any more, and is closing the service in the country.
A statement from Yahoo!
Mail tells users that they will have four months, until 19
August, to save their emails and switch to another provider. The
company suggests moving to AliCloud -- if users do so, any mail
sent to the old account address will still be received in the new
AliCloud inbox up until the end of 2014.
AliCloud is provided by Alibaba, the giant web company that runs
many of China's largest ecommerce sites, including eBay-like Taobao
(the tenth-most-viewed site in the world according to Alexa) and
the payment platform Alipay, which had more than 700 million registered users as of September 2012
(far surpassing the 128 million users of
Paypal).
Yahoo! Mail has been available in China for more than ten years,
but Alibaba and Yahoo! struck a strategic partnership deal in
October 2005 that saw the Chinese firm take responsibility for
running Yahoo!'s key Chinese web products. Yahoo! paid Alibaba $1
billion (£656 million), and in return gained a 40 percent share of
Alibaba stock.Despite having sold some of that, its remaining 24 percent of stock is a highly-valuable asset -- Alibaba handled 1.1 trillion yuan of sales in 2012, more than eBay and Amazon combined. The company is expected to undergo an IPO later this year, with an expected valuation somewhere between £36 billion to £78 billion.
Under new CEO Marissa Mayer, Yahoo! has shed many of its services in a bid to find a more content-focused business strategy. The company announced last week six more of these to be shuttered by the end of April 2013 -- Upcoming, Yahoo! Deals, Yahoo! SMS Alerts, Yahoo! Kids, Yahoo! Mail and Messenger feature phone apps and older versions of its Yahoo! Mail app.
However, Yahoo!'s £20 million acquisition of Summly (and the hiring of its creator, Nick D'Aloisio) last month shows the company isn't settling to just cut off redundant limbs, and is actively shifting its focus.
The closure of Yahoo! Mail in China will leave Yahoo! with its home web portal as its only presence in the most populous country in the world. While Yahoo! Mail had reportedly had more than 200 million Chinese customers in 2009, its popularity has rapidly waned to the extent it is now only the sixth-most-populer email service in China serving only two percent of Chinese email users.
Domestic email providers, like Alibaba's AliCloud, are vastly
more popular, though millions of customers are still likely to be
affected by Yahoo! Mail's closure.
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