AOL planning to invade China

A RUMOUR circulating in Chinese media has it that America On Line (AOL) has plans to move into China's online market.

Everyone's least-favourite ISP has reportedly been looking for recruits via local headhunters. The rumours are that AOL plans to set up an R&D centre in Beijing and will be focusing on mobile communications, web technology research and online publishing.

AOL launched websites in Taiwan and Hong Kong earlier this week, so it's too soon to tell yet whether the walled garden Internet company is attracting very many Chinese wibblers. Word in the Chinese media is that AOL is very late entering the Chinese Internet market and might have difficulty selling its US-centric brand to Chinese surfers.

US based Internet brands have had rather mixed success in China. The Chinese search engine Baidu is far more popular there than Google. Microsoft's MSN and its instant messaging service lag behind China's QQ. Yahoo does have some subscribers in China, but it pays Alibaba to manage its Chinese web presence.

AOL bought an interest in the second-tier Chinese website China.com nearly ten years ago but didn't get very far with it and eventually abandoned the project.It's hard to imagine what China might have done to deserve invasion by AOL, which is widely abhorred by savvy Internet users everywhere else. However, it's no secret that parent company Time Warner would like to flog AOL to the first sucker it can find, so perhaps the proposed move of AOL into China is a way to groom the dog a bit prior to sale.