A Global Mobile Internet Conference kicked off last night in Beijing. The opening event was an on-stage interview with John Liu, head of Google’s China operations, followed by a panel discussion with several entrepreneurs and executives from MSN and Zynga.
The interview was titled “How foreign companies can succeed in China”, a rather amusing title considering that no foreign Internet company has ever achieved a dominant position in the People’s Republic. Cynics in the audience joked that after Google’s famous partial withdrawal from China, John Liu’s presentation should perhaps been called “How foreign companies can fail in China” and name checked eBay, Yahoo and MSN as foreign companies whose performance in this market can best be described as mediocre.
Liu’s interview and most of the panel discussion was all vanilla until Groupon was mentioned.
Panelists Alvin Wang Graylin (CEO of mobile search provider Minfo) and Dominic Penaloza (CEO of Ushi, a LinkedIn clone) talked about the high numbers of non Chinese speaking foreigners who are running Groupon’s China operations – a classic mistake made by foreign companies in any industry in China. Kaiser Kuo (head of international communications for Chinese search giant Baidu) mentioned Groupon’s famous Superbowl commercial which managed to enrage both the free Tibet crowd and Chinese nationalists in the same week Groupon launched in China, and the sudden departure of their China sales director after a few weeks on the job, which everyone in China tech circles knew about immediately because he publicized on his Weibo (Sina. com’s popular Twitter-like service).
The only nice thing anyone had to say about Groupon was that they have just succeeded in purchasing the domain name Groupon. cn from one of the thousand-plus Groupon clones that are already operating in China.
Kuo crisply summed up the prevailing sentiment: “Groupon is getting it in the ass”.
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