Yahoo!Mail China Closed
- On August 27, 2013
China Yahoo! Mail has officially shut down Today, Aug 19, 2013 at 23:59 China Standard Time. All of your China Yahoo! Mail e-mail, contacts and account settings were deleted and unavailable unless you took the migration options before.
Closing Yahoo Mail, one of the earliest e-mail service providers in China, will leave the brand with only its web portal business in the China market. it’s also another sign of the brand’s shrinking presence in the Chinese market. The company, part of Internet giant Yahoo, has been run by China’s e-commerce leader Alibaba since 2005 after the two firms shook hands on a $1 billion deal that saw Yahoo given 40 percent of then little-known Alibaba’s stock. Yahoo retains a 20 percent stake in Alibaba today.
Yahoo China told users few months ago that they would have to register a mailbox with AliCloud, a core business unit under Alibaba, to make sure their e-mails and other information will be kept instead of being deleted when Yahoo Mail ceases its operations.
Zhang Jianhua, from the public relations of Alibaba, said the Yahoo Mail business sector is not profitable. The portal service is profitable, but seems very small when compared with other business units under Alibaba.
Analysts said Alibaba has been marginalizing Yahoo China’s business by focusing on its lucrative e-commerce business Taobao, which dominates the domestic market, and the introduction of a cloud computing business under the AliCloud banner.
"I think Alibaba is giving up Yahoo China, while saving the resources of clients by transferring them to AliCloud," said Hong Bo, a Beijing IT expert and founder of IT5G.
"But Alibaba seems irresponsible by bringing troubles to the users," Hong said. "They will have to update their e-mail address information on many occasions."
Alibaba’s Zhang said the AliCloud mailbox will provide a stable service with a strong anti-spam function.
Data from Hitwise, a division of information services group Experian that measures website traffic, shows visits to Yahoo Mail have declined and the brand now has less than 2 percent of China’s total mailbox users. According to iResearch, there were more than 218 million e-mail users in China by the end of 2009.