Xie Enwei, general manager of management and operations of Microsoft in China, speaks during the launching of the Xbox One in Shanghai in 2014. (Photo : Reuters)
Microsoft has announced on Wednesday, May 11, that it plans to close its Web portal for China, MSN China, early next month, according to an article published by techcrunch.com.
The announcement was made by the company in a statement emailed by a representative which said: "Microsoft will be shutting down the MSN portal in China on June 7. Microsoft is deeply committed to China, offering a range of products including Windows 10, cloud services to customers, and hosting the largest research and development center outside of the U.S."
Microsoft, whose main R&D center for the Asia-Pacific region is based in Beijing, announced last December that a special version of Windows 10 was being developed by the company to be used by Chinese government agencies.
As the company is also planning to expand its cloud computing and enterprise software business in China, the number of corporate customers for Microsoft Azure has increased from 50,000 a year ago to the current 65,000.
With the growing opportunity in China, Forrester, an American market research company, said that the cloud market is expected to grow to $3.8 billion by 2020, more than twice its size last year. Microsoft, however, has to compete on its own against other services that include Alibaba's cloud unit, Tencent, and Amazon Web Services.
MSN China was launched as a joint venture between MSN (the division of Microsoft that runs Internet services like Hotmail, Skype, and Bing) and Shanghai Alliance Investment 11 years ago. It was the first partnership that Microsoft had made with a company in China, offering mobile Internet services.
But local competitors like Tencent's WeChat, Sina Weibo and Baidu have surpassed various MSN China features, including a search engine, news articles, a microblogging platform and a messaging service, over the last 10 years.
MSN Messenger, which was one of the most popular messaging services in China when MSN China opened, ceased its operation about two years ago.
