Having slowly wound down its services over the past decade, Yahoo officially left the Chinese market on Sunday.
Yahoo has become the latest American company to decouple itself from the Chinese marketplace, amid tighter internet regulations and censorship requirements. On Saturday, the California-based company released a short statement saying Yahoo would « no longer provide content for users in mainland China » as of November 1. « Yahoo products and services remain unaffected in all other global locations, » it added. Yahoo—operator of global services including a search engine, news sites, email platform and more—told agencies on Tuesday that its decision to quit the 1.4-billion-person market was « in recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China. » « Yahoo remains committed to the rights of our users and a free and open internet, » it said without elaborating. Before Monday, Yahoo’s services in China included news and weather, according to Reuters, which said the company entered the Chinese market in 1998.
