Page 156 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

None of them has entered China. PingCo stands a good chance of becoming
much larger in its local market than any of those look-alike services. Phones with
GPRS—the kind that can run PingCo’s features—are being adopted quickly in
China as well as in the rest of Asia and in Europe. Currently, only 8 percent of
mobile phones in China have GPRS technology, but Wang predicts that by 2008,
nearly 90 percent of phone purchasers will upgrade to models with GPRS.
Against the noise of rivals, PingCo is ramping up very fast. PingCo raised
$3 million from GSR and Mayfield in August 2005, when the company was
5
only three months old. PingCo soon hired 10 employees. Today, it has 60. In
June 2007, PingCo got what every young company needs: an additional $5.5
million from investors. 6
Alex Pan, a managing director at GSR, tells me that his team had some
initial reservations about funding PingCo because it was new and untried. But
the venture partners were won over after seeing a prototype of the service. It
was the type of disruptive technology service they were searching for, the kind
that can result in a financial home run. PingCo software runs on Java, the
same platform used by developers to design mobile games. Today, PingCo is
one of the more promising finds among the 14 start-ups GSR has supported
since mid-2005.

T singhua sightlines

Back with Wang in his BMW, we drive along the wide boulevards of this new
tech zone in Beijing and pull into the garage of his office building. It’s a state-
owned building that houses the government’s bureau for registering new busi-
nesses. Wang has managed to get a bargain rental rate here. His corner office
has a view of the Tsinghua campus.
Wang sets aside the morning for our interview. He patiently and method-
ically goes over the business plan as staff people keep interrupting with
questions. Wang is not distracted by them or by the text messages he con-
tinually receives. He pauses to show me how to check how many minutes I
have left on my China Mobile phone card. It turns out there’s an English
version of the prompts to follow, so it’s pretty simple.
Knowing that my interview is his chance for Western press that might
give PingCo a push to an initial public offering (IPO), Wang focuses on the
key issue: how PingCo is going to make money. Wang intends to get sub-

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