The Wall Street Journal Reported on September 7, 2011 that Chinese Regulators Renew Key License for Google. What this means for Google is another year of doing business legally, albeit via a Chinese partner, since China doesn’t grant business licenses directly to foreign companies in China–according to this ZDNet article. But after all the jousting between the Google and the Chinese over hacking charges and censorship, one might wonder why the People’s Republic would re-embrace Google. Unfortunately, there’s no way to pull back the pall of Chinese mystery to get the real answer, so we are left to speculate.
What signal would cutting off the world’s most famous search engine send to others considering doing business in China? If Google were banned from doing business in China for their beliefs in freedom of information, intellectual property protection, and user privacy rights, then every other Western style company may begin to worry about doing business in China. However with the largest consumer base in the world (1.3 billion), it’s likely businesses all over the world will compromise wherever possible to get access to China. And it may be the case that Google has compromised its moral of “do no evil” to stay, but as one Chinese consultant said, “if a business wants to survive in China, it must follow the law of the land.”
Though Yahoo! Store ecommerce merchants and many other U.S. ecommerce merchants don’t have platform compatibility to do business in China (for Yahoo! Stores there is a Global Solution, but the store editor doesn’t have a Chinese character option), it’s probably safe to say that U.S. ecommerce merchants will find a way to market product to the Chinese sometime in the near future. With that in mind, it’s best to think through your own China strategy, with Google’s missteps in mind, before making the move toward market penetration.
