Yahoo!has decided its Chinese customers don't need their emailaccounts any more,and is closing the service in the country.
A statement from Yahoo!Mail tells users thatthey willhave four months,until 19August, to save their emails andswitch to another provider. Thecompany suggests moving to AliCloud -- if users do so,anymail sent to the old account address will still be received in the newAliCloud inbox up until the end of 2014.
AliCloud is provided byAlibaba,the giant web company that runsmany of China's largest ecommerce sites, including eBay-like Taobao(the tenth-most-viewed site in the world according to Alexa ) andthe payment platform Alipay, which had more than 700 million registered users as of September 2012(far surpassing the 128 million users ofPaypal ).
Yahoo!Mailhas been available in China for more than ten years, but Alibaba and Yahoo!struck astrategic partnership deal inOctober 2005 that saw the Chinese firm take responsibilityforrunning Yahoo!'s key Chinese web products. Yahoo! paid Alibaba $1billion (£656million), andin return gained a 40 percent share ofAlibabastock.
Despite having soldsome of that ,its remaining 24 percent of stock is ahighly-valuable asset -- Alibaba handled 1.1 trillion yuan of sales in 2012, more than eBayandAmazon combined. The companyis expected to undergo an IPO laterthis year, with an expected valuation somewhere between £36 billionto £78 billion.
Under new CEO MarissaMayer,Yahoo! has shedmany of itsservices in a bidto find amore content-focused business strategy .The company announced last week six more of these to be shuttered bythe end of April2013--Upcoming, Yahoo!Deals, Yahoo!SMS Alerts, Yahoo!Kids, Yahoo!Mailand Messenger feature phone apps andolder versions of its Yahoo! Mail app.
However,Yahoo!'s £20 million acquisition of Summly (and the hiring of itscreator, Nick D'Aloisio) last month shows the company isn'tsettling to just cut off redundant limbs, and is actively shiftingits focus.
The closure of Yahoo! Mailin China willleave Yahoo! with itshome web portalas its only presence in the most populous countryin 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 thesixth-most-populer emailservice in China serving only two percentof Chinese emailusers.
Domesticemailproviders,like Alibaba's AliCloud, are vastlymore popular,though millions of customers are still likely to beaffected by Yahoo!Mail's closure.
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