Japanese Tech Giant Booms in China; Eyes Massive Search Engine Market
In spite of its relative anonymity, a company known as Softbank would be to Japan as Google (Information - Alert) would be to us U.S. citizens – and it is now targeting the bigger Asian market, IT insiders say.
Actually, Softbank provides far more than a search engine. The organization also runs the “fastest-growing mobile phone carrier in Japan and operates its largest broadband network,” reports Hiroko Tabuchi with the New York Times.
“Softbank is also the sole Japanese carrier for that Apple (News - Alert) iPhone; additionally it may be the only organization providing information service for that iPad,” Tabuchi adds.
Many of us cannot imagine existence without our infamous lookup engine, in no way thoughts the truth that it has been transformed into a verb as commonly utilized as “xerox” and “Twitter.” Even thoughSoftbank’s ( Information - Notify) popularity has skyrocketed because its founding in 1981 by CEO Masayoshi Son, there is one thing standing in the way of the company’s leadership within the Asian market.
Unfortunately, that one little thing is China, which may be a tough nut to crack for foreign Internet businesses. Corporations for example the aforementioned “Google, eBay and Yahoo, not to mention social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace (News - Alert) and Twitter, have all struggled there, due to powerful domestic competition along with federal government blocking and censorship,” says Tabuchi.
China has currently had its fair share of difficulties in the privacy department with our personal Google. Jon Arnold (Information - Notify), a service provider columnist for TMCnet.com, believes that “the Google/China issue is really drawing this into concentrate right now. The original Internet vision was global, with all of us interconnected below one cloud, so to speak. I suspect that China will not back down…