Alibaba Opens New Data Center in Singapore Alibaba (NYSE: BABA, market cap $186 billion) is a giant tech force and competes against Amazon in more ways than one. One of the ways is in the cloud computing business, where Amazon serves a huge number of companies via its Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Alibaba has Aliyun. [...]
Forbes Feature on Garena A good article on history of Garena, Southeast Asia's answer to Tencent and Alibaba, and what brought Forrest Li to found it. Lisa Hanson is quoted in the article as well. Steam's Presence in China Steam Spy's data shows that an average game on Steam sells 320,000 units. Different countries have different [...]
The 2015 Chinese College Graduate Job Report A third-party education institution released a "2015 Chinese College Graduate Job Report." The report shows the 2014 income of various kinds of jobs of those who graduated between 3 months and 3 years ago. The job with the highest average monthly income is game designer (RMB 5273/month = $850/mo), [...]
Tencent Invests in Glu Mobile According to Seeking Alpha, "Along with its Q1 results, Glu Mobile has announced that Chinese gaming/messaging giant Tencent investing $126M in the company through the purchase of 21M shares at $6 apiece. Tencent will own approximately 15% of Glu once the deal closes, and Glu will have a $190M cash balance.With [...]
Clash of Clans in China Read Lisa Hanson's latest post on Forbes.com regarding Clash of Clans and possible reasons for its success in China: Did you happen to see Liam Neeson's Super Bowl commercial for Clash of Clans? The numbers say you probably did. The one-minute spot featured the gravel-voiced Irish thespian self-parodying his popular character [...]
Sony PS4 to Launch on March 20th in China Sony Computer Entertainment Japan Asia (SCEJA) announced that more than two months after the planned launch, it will finally actually launch the PS4 and PS Vita in mainland China on March 20th. The company has not stated the actual reasons for the delay, but as Niko Partners [...]
NBA Partnership with Tencent The NBA announced a 5-year partnership with Tencent stating that Tencent will be the league's Exclusive Official Digital Partner of live NBA games in China for the next five seasons. Beginning next season, fans will no longer able to watch NBA games on Sina.com, letv.com and v.qq.com, but only on Tencent's platform. [...]
Bloomberg Interview with Niko Partners The article discusses the difficulty of success in China's mobile games market compared with the rest of the world, using US-based Playdot's games TwoDots as the case study. One of Niko's data points that is used in this article shows our estimate that roughly 40% of Chinese mobile gamers spend some [...]
MOL Global's IPO MOL Global had its initial public offering (NASDAQ: MOLG) on October 9th, and raised $169 million. MOL is the largest e-payment provider in SE Asia, covering 13 countries and 920,000 physical sales spots in 4 continents. It is the largest e-payment service provider in SEA's games industry, and a vast number of SEA [...]
China's BesTV (Xbox Partner) and Oriental Pearl (Sony Partner) May Merge Niko has written in the Niko News (5/29) that it is interesting that Microsoft's Chinese JV partner for Xbox One (BesTV) and Sony's Chinese JV partner for PS4 (Oriental Pearl Culture Development) are owned by the same parent company, the Shanghai Media Group, which in [...]
