Yahoo, the well-known US tech firm, announced that its email services will no longer be supported in the Chinese mainland starting from Monday, as the US tech company continued its pullout from one of the world’s most competitive internet markets.
As a reminder, beginning February 28, 2022, Yahoo’s suite of services will unfortunately no longer be accessible from Chinese mainland. In all other regions, Yahoo Mail features will remain unaffected… After February 28, you will no longer be able to send or receive new emails from Chinese mainland or download data, according to an email from Yahoo Mail team to its members.
Yahoo had already scaled back its presence in the Chinese market over the past few years.
In November 2021, Yahoo decided to terminate its services to users based in the Chinese mainland, citing an increasingly challenging business and legal environment.
But experts told the Global Times that the move was driven by its own business failure and has nothing to do with China’s business and legal environment.
Liu Dingding, a Beijing-based independent tech analyst, told the Global Times earlier that Yahoo’s influence and market share had been reduced to “negligible levels” even five or six years ago.
Yahoo’s move to downsize last year came within less than a month following the closure of Microsoft’s LinkedIn social-networking site in China. LinkedIn later launched a new job boards app called InJobs instead.
At present, many of Yahoo’s products and services are no longer accessible in the Chinese mainland.
When Yahoo’s data breach hit 3 billion accounts back in 2017, tens of millions of accounts in the Chinese mainland were affected, according to media reports at the time.
In an age prior to search giant Google, Yahoo was the world’s top search engine provider and the world’s first portal search website. It opened its Chinese website in 1999 and was acquired by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba in 2005. However, it was quickly surpassed by Google.
A Yahoo billboard stands at a wealth-management exhibition in Shanghai. Yahoo realized $272 million in profit in the fourth quarter of 2012, down 8 percent year-on-year, while its revenue was up 2 percent in the same period, reaching $1.35 billion, the company said Tuesday. Photo: CFP
