Friday - August 16

China Mobile sees wireless data more than double

China Mobile Ltd, the world's biggest phone company by number of users, saw data traffic more than double in the first half of the year, as the State-owned company shifts focus from voice and message services to data services.

Wireless data traffic jumped 129 percent in the first six months to 891.4 billion megabytes, up from 389.2 billion megabytes in the same period last year. The figure follows an increase of 187 percent in 2012.

Revenue from wireless data traffic grew 62.2 percent to 47.4 billion yuan ($7.68 billion) in the first half, up from 29.2 billion yuan in the same period last year. Revenue from data services accounted for 33.5 percent of the State-owned company's telecommunications services. (Photo 1)

US has 17 of the top 20 global universities

Seventeen of the top 20 universities ranked by a Chinese research center are US schools, with Harvard topping the list for the 11th time.

The survey by the research center of Shanghai's Jiaotong University covers more than 1,200 universities and the top 500 are picked by six indicators, including: number of Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners on the faculty, the number of "highly cited" researchers and the number of faculty articles published in Nature and Science magazines.

The top five include Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT. The top 10 also includes CalTech, Princeton, Columbia and the University of Chicago. (Photo 2)

Monday - August 19

New home prices rise more slowly

Home prices in most of China's cities are still on the rise, but monthly increases continue to narrow.

New home prices in 62 of the 70 cities registered month-on-month increases in July, while four remained unchanged and four showed declines, according to the National Bureau of Statistics released data on Sunday indicating that Liu Jianwei, a senior statistician at the NBS, said the rising residential property prices were driven by multiple factors, including demand and recent hikes in land prices.

Hui Jianqiang, research director of Beijing Zhongfang-yanxie Technology Service Ltd, said the slower month-on-month growth rate was mostly the result of seasonal variations.

"July and August are the traditional low season for property transactions, and developers will slow down the pace of sales during these two months," said Hui.

School gets phase one of biggest Wi-Fi network

A Sichuan province medical college has completed phase one of what will become the largest campus Wi-Fi network in China.

Ruckus Wireless Inc of Sunnyvale, California, has teamed up with China Telecom, the State-owned telecommunications giant, to complete phase one of the state-of-the-art system at Luzhou Medical College in western China.

Covering 550,000 square feet of classrooms and offices and 338,000 square feet of dormitory buildings on two major campuses, the network provides "reliable, high-performance Internet access" to more than 15,000 faculty and students, Ruckus said.

Owing to phase one's success, the college plans to initiate phase two, which would extend the system campus-wide, Ruckus said. When completed, the system will be the largest of its kind in China, the company said.

Tuesday - August 20

China Telecom, Netease to take on WeChat

China Telecom Corp Ltd, the nation's biggest fixed line network operator and third-largest mobile service provider, has formed a joint venture with Chinese Internet company NetEase Inc to launch Yixin, a mobile chatting tool.

The move is the world's first joint venture of a telecommunications operator and an Internet company. It also signals the firms' intent to take market share from the market's dominant player, Tencent Holdings Ltd's WeChat.

The biggest difference between Yixin and WeChat, is that the former is capable of sending free text and voice messages to any mobile phone users, whether the receivers have installed the Yixin app or not.

WeChat messaging application had 236 million monthly active users.

Partnership to make hydropower dams safer

The China Three Gorges Corporation (CTGC), which operates the world's largest hydroelectric plant, will partner with US-based nonprofit The Nature Conservancy to make hydropower dams safer for the environment and more profitable.

Hydropower dams are the leading form of renewable energy in the world, and are expected to double in capacity in the coming years. The way that the technology develops will have an impact on rivers including the Yangtze, Mekong, Magdalena and Tapajos.

The partnership with The Nature Conservancy, which has since 1951 protected thousands of miles of rivers and more than 119 million acres of land globally, extends a collaboration that began with an earlier project focused on the Yangtze River. That project replenished the fish population through the sharing of information and scientific research between TNC's conservationists and CTGC's engineers.

Wednesday - August 21

Alibaba pays $75 M for ShopRunner stake

Alibaba Group, China's largest e-commerce company, has acquired a minority stake in online shopping company ShopRunner for $75 million.

ShopRunner, a San Mateo, California-based subscription service, provides unlimited free two-day shipping and returns from participating retailers. Regarded as a competitor to Amazon's Prime service, ShopRunner membership costs $79 a year.

ShopRunner's current CEO is Scott Thompson, former chief executive of Yahoo, which owns almost a quarter of Alibaba.

The purchase, reported by the Financial Times, comes as the Chinese e-commerce giant prepares for a planned IPO, which is widely expected later this year or early next year. Some analysts believe Alibaba's investment in ShopRunner is further preparation for entering the US market and on-going promotion for the upcoming IPO. (Photo 3)

Chinese use smartphone as primary media device

More Chinese than Americans use a smartphone as their primary media device, but more Americans depend on it so much that they would "never leave home without it", according to a study.

The study by two trade associations surveyed 4,500 smartphone users, 3,500 in China and 1,000 in the US.

It found that smartphone ownership changes users' media-consumption habits to a greater degree in China than in the US.

More than a quarter of the Chinese smartphone owners surveyed reported 28 percent less TV watching and 27 percent less consumption of print media as a result of owning a mobile-connected device.

Compared with US counterparts, Chinese smartphone owners were 86 percent more likely to report less TV viewing and 42 percent more likely to report less consumption of print media, the study showed. (Photo 4)

Thursday - August 22

China will become world's biggest oil importer

China's energy needs are growing so fast that it will become the world's biggest importer of crude oil within the next four years, according to a report.

China is expected to spend $500 billion on crude oil imports by 2020, according to the report by consultancy group Wood Mackenzie. That expenditure by the world's second-biggest economy eclipses the most the US has ever spent - $335 billion - on crude imports.

Meanwhile, the US' crude-oil import bill is predicted to fall to about $160 billion by 2020 as the world's biggest economy moves to replace imports with more domestic oil production from shale resources.

Apple's iPad shipments to China and sales decline

Apple Inc's iPad shipments to China in the second quarter were halved from the previous quarter, and its market share in the country shrank to 28 percent from 49 percent during the same period, according to International Data Corp, a global market intelligence firm.

Apple's product is still No 1 in terms of market share in China's tablet computer sector but rapidly increasing sales numbers from Android-based rivals have led to a more challenging market for it.

"I think Apple intentionally reduced the shipment of iPads in the second quarter," said Dickie Chang, a Hong Kong-based analyst with IDC. "They need to protect the interest of those who just bought the iPad 4."

(China Daily 08/23/2013 page8)