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 新海归系列：网大（netbig.com）CEO黄沁(又一个科大少年班的) |
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新海归系列：网大（netbig.com）CEO黄沁(又一个科大少年班的) -- 安普若 - (7142 Byte) 2003-8-15 周五, 10:57 (3860 reads) |
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作者：游客 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
Businessweek Online
FEBRUARY 28, 2000
ONLINE ASIA
By Bruce Einhorn
Internet Time Has Hit China. Just Ask Charles Huang
This 29-year-old MIT-trained Netrepreneur is working frantically to make sure his Netbig.com is one of China's survivors
In an industry populated with youthful entrepreneurs trying to pass themselves off as whiz kids, Charles Huang is the real thing. This 29-year-old entrepreneur has spent most of his life trying to beat the clock. Born in the central Chinese city of Changsha, he raced through school, skipping grades as other kids skip classes. By age 14, he completed secondary school and enrolled in one of China's top science universities. At 18, Huang was off to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he got a masters in computer science. He then went into finance. By age 24, he was a senior vice-president at Prudential Securities.
It didn't take long before Huang caught the Internet bug. During a stint at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong, he helped provide the seed money to MIT classmate Charles Zhang, who used it to launch Sohu.com, one of China's top portals. Last year, Huang got into the action himself. He and two Chinese classmates launched their own Chinese-language site, a youth portal called Netbig.com, targeting the large student population in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The site now gets 1.5 million page views a day and has 200,000 registered users, mostly in China.
While Huang is used to the fast pace, even he is taken aback by what has happened the past few days in Hong Kong with the upcoming initial public offering of rival portal tom.com. The Web site is almost brand new, so new that it practically has no content on it. But it's owned by two of Hong Kong's most powerful companies, Hutchison Whampoa and Cheung Kong. And those companies in turn are owned by Hong Kong's most powerful man, billionaire Li Ka-shing.
RED-CHIP REPRISE. With tom.com's IPO, Hong Kong has gone mad for a chance to combine one of the city-state's oldest pieces of investment advice -- stick with Li Ka-shing, and he'll make you a bundle -- with a new one -- go with the Internet. Thousands of people lined up for hours the other day just to get the form that would allow them to apply for shares in the IPO.
Hong Kong hasn't seen such investor frenzy since 1997, in the weeks before the territory's return to Chinese rule. Back then, local stock players were fixated on "red chips," the Hong Kong-listed companies backed by the Chinese government. With their political ties, the red chips seemed assured to win big in China. So Hong Kong investors went crazy for stocks like Beijing Enterprises, controlled by the Beijing city government. Beijing Enterprises went public in the summer of 1997, and its stock price quickly soared. But that was short-lived. Soon, the Asian crisis hit, and the red chips tanked.
If tom.com is to the Internet what Beijing Enterprises was to the red chips, then Huang knows he needs to move quickly. The bubble can't go on forever, and time is running short. "The speed is so much faster these days," he says. "Tom.com doesn't have a lot in there now, but it can grow very fast."
ACQUIRE OR DIE. Huang certainly isn't sitting still. Netbig secured $10 million in funding last October from a collection of investors that include local property developer Sino Land and Singapore-based venture-capital fund Vertex Asset Management, owned by government-run Singapore Technologies. Huang is now working on the next round of fund-raising -- and plotting strategy in a feverish market. "This is the last year for Internet companies [in Asia] to grow," he says. "You either have to acquire companies, merge, or be acquired -- or you will be dead."
Huang is trying to build up Netbig as quickly as he can. Over the past month, he has acquired four Chinese companies, with Web sites that offer information ranging from tips on taking college entrance exams and the test of English as a foreign language. Other acquisitions include game sites and a teen site that offers advice on dating and makeup. And last month Netbig co-published a guide to Chinese college entrance exams with the official China Youth Daily.
Huang thinks that soon it will be harder to do deals in China, thanks to the likes of tom.com. But he's not worried. Li Ka-shing's portal may drive the Hong Kong investors wild, but so far, it's all promise and no profits. To grab the eyeballs he needs, Li will try to bulk up tom.com with Chinese-language content. And following the Mar. 1 commencement of trading, he'll have tom.com stock to use as currency.
That's leading to inflation in China's acquisition market. "The price of sites is going up," Huang says. Companies like tom.com, chinadotcom, and others "will be trying to grow faster by acquiring sites." By yearend, Huang predicts that the Chinese Internet will already be in its consolidation phase. And by that time, his Netbig.com could be true to its name -- and be big enough to do some acquiring of its own. And after all, time has always been on Charles Huang's side.
Einhorn is Asia technology correspondent for Business Week. His column appears every Monday for BW Online
EDITED BY DOUGLAS HARBRECHT
作者：游客 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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