Page 154 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

public company with Founder and Yahoo! as the controlling shareholders. But
by 2003, the Internet bubble had burst, and the Yahoo! venture was struggling
to keep up with Chinese portals that had more local content than Yahoo!’s
translated content from the United States. Wang’s mentor Lee, meanwhile, set
off to start a software firm in Shanghai and asked Wang to join him.
But that time his young protégé opted to strike out on his own. “You
can’t always follow the mentor,” says Wang. “It was time for me to do some-
thing by myself.”
Wang worked as a sales director for two years in Beijing for the French
smartcard chip maker Gemplus. He bumped into Tiger Wu, a programmer
who developed SMS software for China Mobile. Wu was a 1996 graduate of
Beijing Union University and a software coding genius. They teamed up to
start PingCo, betting on the fast-
growing market for mobile Internet
services.
“PingCo is pursuing a calculated but risky As a safety net, Wang’s wife, a
path. What it is doing is not illegal. But classmate from university days,
China Mobile could put any company out of kept her job as an information tech-
business.” nology manager at the formerly
state-owned and now Hong Kong-
Kevin Fong,
listed China Merchant Bank. The
managing director, Mayfield Fund
young couple lives in the coun-
tryside near the mountains sur-
rounding Beijing, where Wang’s
mother looks after their three-year-old son. “My wife wanted to keep her job.
We didn’t want to put all our eggs in one basket,” says Wang, using an
American colloquialism that sometimes is heard these days in urban China.
This is Wang’s first start-up, and most new businesses fail. Still unprof-
itable and dependent on venture capitalists, PingCo has to show traction with
advertisers and consumers and monetize its services, says Duncan Clark of the
advisory firm BDA. But PingCo is in the right line of work. “We believe
instant messaging is a good community platform, both online and wireless,”
Clark says, “which can keep users coming back for more.”
Clark points out that PingCo now has competition in China from players
with similar services. Microsoft’s MSN and Tencent’s QQ offer mobile instant
messaging for a fee. Additionally, the newcomer PICA has attracted more

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