BEIJING (AP) -- For a glimpse at how fast China's Internet market is growing and how eager foreigners are for a piece of it, consider Etang.com Inc.
The company has raised $40 million in three months. Its chairman has a vision and promises to make money but can't say exactly how.Yet these are heady times for the Internet in China, and Etang.com is not to be deterred. Founded by two China natives with Harvard MBAs six months ago, Etang.com launched its portal site in November.
Already, the company has 160 employees, 200,000 registered site users and plans to list this year on NASDAQ, the U.S. stock market popular with new technology companies.
"This shows the level of investor interest in the Internet," said Ted Dean with BDA China Ltd., a media and Internet consulting firm in Beijing. "We're at the beginning of the Chinese Internet bubble."
In recent weeks, Internet heavyweights such as U.S.-based online auctioneer eBay Inc. have announced China forays, joining Yahoo! Inc. and other more established foreign hands.
Finance behemoth Citigroup and Japan's Softbank put $10 million into MeetChina.com, an e-commerce venture. U.S.-based GWcom Inc. landed $56 million from Hong Kong for a portal site serving Chinese customers.
By official count, the number of registered users quadrupled last year to nearly 9 million. But the true number of users is not known because many Chinese share accounts to defray high line fees and other costs.
China's top telecommunications regulator has said foreign stakes in Internet firms will be limited, although how limited may not be clear until Beijing joins the World Trade Organization, likely later this year.
China has prohibited Internet firms from posting information not cleared by the government and has demanded that companies register software that protects sensitive data transfers -- a key tool in e-commerce.
"The Internet is still in its infancy, and everywhere there's big-time ambiguity about how things are going to work," Dale LeFebvre, Etang.com's chief financial officer, told reporters Tuesday. "There's enormous change going on in China and that change represents opportunity." Etang.com has targeted China's growing yuppie community, or those between the ages of 18 and 35. The company describes its audience as educated and practical and refers to its potential customers as Generation Yellow. In addition to the usual offerings of news and free e-mail, Etang offers four sites on colleges, the job market, personal finance and entertainment.