Google Buys Stake in Xunlei

Google announced on Thursday that it would purchase a small state in Chinese web site Xunlei.com. The company, located in Shenzen, allows users to download music and video from the Internet. If Google made a New Year's Resolution to increase its presence within the Chinese nation in 2007, then the company is off to a good start. Just a day earlier, Google announce a partnership article on the deal, sources close to the deal say that Google paid about $5 million for a 4 percent stake in Xunlei. The content restrictions that the Chinese government has placed on the Internet have been a bane for U.S. companies looking to get a foothold in the market. China boasts an online user base at somewhere around 130 million users, second only to the United States in that regard. Since it is extremely difficult for foreign nations to establish any kind of presence within the Chinese market, partnerships like the ones Google has made with China Mobile and Xunlei become increasingly important, as local Chinese startups tend to draw a large percentage of the nation's user base. David Barboza talks about this in the Murdok. Visit Murdok for the