China Netcom's Edward Tian establishes a China VC fund

Filed in archive Venture Capital on November 21, 2005

According to SinoCast, Edward Tian, VP of China Netcom Group, will give up day- to- day responsibilities to launch a $30 million venture capital fund. China Netcom Group, through its main operating subsidiary CNC China, is the leading provider of fixed-line telecom services, including broadband and Internet access, data, and business communications, in six northern areas of China (Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Henan, Shandong, and Liaoning).

No doubt, the earlier success of Baidu.com, a Chinese search engine similar to Google, in its spectacular public offering via Nasdaq IPO has fueled the incentives of many successful entrepreneurs to take their riches and set up their own VC funds. After all, Baidu's shares were offered at $27 and then soared as high as $151.24 on its first day of trading Baidu still has a market cap of $2.6 billion on trailing revenues of $13 million, or 108 times revenue.

Prior to CNC, Tian was co-Founder and President of publicly traded Asiainfo. Tian is the latest in a string of successful Chinese entrepreneurs launching indpendent VC funds. Others include Min Zhu (Webex), Feng Deng and Yang Ke (Netscreen), and Neil Shen (Ctrip). Pacific Epoch had reported only a few months ago that Ctrip's Online travel service provider founder and CFO, Neil Shen resigned to join venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.

With the arrival of these these intrepid Chinese entrepreneurs on the domestic VC front, the finance scene and still nascent VC industry might become even more compelling to watch from these sidelines.