Yahoo China shut down its website in China over the weekend. The Yahoo China website redirects to now.taobao.com, a website run by Alibaba, a company in which Yahoo has a stake of 40%. Alibaba has been running Yahoo’s operations in China and after Yahoo shuting down its email service in china has now shut-down its china web portal. Yahoo is no longer proving news in China.
However Yahoo may not directly pull out of china because of the stake it has in Alibaba and now.taobao.com which is a news website run by Taobao which is part of the Alibaba group. Employees of yahoo china have been moved to Taobao.
Yahoo’s exit follows a recent trend of foreign companies in china, shutting down including Google, and even yahoo’s own services such as yahoo music, yahoo’s email service which transferred all its users to Alimail which is under Alibababa.
Yahoo china previously granted Alibaba the rights to run Yahoo China for 4 years under the brand ‘Yahoo’ which means Yahoo may not permanently drop out of China but will have its services run by Alibaba.
Source: AFP
