No joy for Yahoo China as e-mail service to close_美文

No joy for Yahoo China as e-mail service to close

Millions of users will have to make the change, he said, but the specific number is not yet available.

Zhang 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.

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.

Yahoo retains a 20 percent stake in Alibaba.

The latter has signaled that it is preparing to go public. Analysts said it could be valued at as much as $120 billion, almost five times more than Yahoo's mid-April market capitalization of $26.2 billion.

About the broadcaster:

Nelly Min is an editor at China Daily with more than 10 years of experience as a newspaper editor and photographer. She has worked at major newspapers in the U.S., including the Los Angeles Times and the Detroit Free Press. She is also fluent in Korean.