Saturday, February 5, 2005

ChinaHR.com Monster Worldwide announced that they will take over 40% of ChinaHR.com's shares for a total of USD 50 million. ChinaHR.com is a Chinese recruitment website with more than 3 million registered users. It has big growth plans, but faces fierce competition from both 51job.com and zhaopin.com. 51job.com IPO'ed last year on the NASDAQ. Its shares did exremely well, quadrupling in price in the 4 months since the IPO. It is often a strategy for foreign websites to enter the Chinese market by taking over a big Chinese player. A quick way to enter the market, but not very cheap. Ebay for example, took over Eachnet.com for USD 150 million in 2003. Eachnet was set up in 1999 by two Chinese Harvard graduates. Because most Chinese are not able to ready English, foreign sites don't have many pageviews here. Chinese websites are also very different from their overseas counterparts, with lots of flash animations. pop-up ads and all kinds of colors that do not seem to fit together. It seems that Chinese like the design, at least I don't hear many complaints about it. 7:31:55 PM    comment []