VR-Zone

 

Daniel Alegre, head of Google Asia-Pacific, said that the company is hiring additional engineers, salespeople and product managers and will be introducing new products and services, particularly for Android devices, for Chinese consumers over the coming months.

 

Alegre said that Google's go-founders recognise the “very large business opportunity in China”.

 

Google never completely abandoned China, but it did severely curtail its investment there, including a drop in employees from 700 to 500. Google also did not release a lot of features in the country that many other countries around the world have. For example, China currently does not have access to the Android Market, Google's equivalent of Apple's App Store, but that is set to change.

 

 

Google previously threatened to completely withdraw from China after it attributed an alleged cyberattack of Gmail accounts belonging to human rights activists to the country. Google also decided it would no longer cooperate with the government's internet censorship rules, redirecting users of its Google.cn website to the uncensored Hong Kong equivalent.

 

That move is believed to have originated from Google's co-founder Sergey Brin, with the company's then CEO, Eric Schmidt, expressing an unwillingness to leave the lucrative Chinese market. Now that tensions have eased and as analysts continue to predict massive growth in China's technology industry, it appears that Google is willing to let bygones be bygones and return to China.

 

Source: Wall Street Journal