Industry Internet Key people Yu Yongfu (President) Founded 2004 Key person Yu Yongfu (President) Parent organization Alibaba Group | Area served Worldwide Website www.ucweb.com Headquarters Guangzhou, China Founders He Xiaopeng, Liang Jie | |
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Products mobile web browser,
mobile search engine, etc. Subsidiaries Teiron Network Technology Co.,Ltd., 9game.cn, Blovestorm.com | ||
Facebook and ucweb on expanding into global markets
UCWeb Inc. (also known as UC Mobile) is a Chinese mobile Internet company that offers products and services including mobile browser, search and so on. Its flagship product, UC Browser, topped the China, Indonesia and India market in 2013.
UCWeb was founded in 2004 as a mobile browser maker; over the past decade it expanded to diversified areas such as mobile search, mobile gaming, mobile reading, etc. The company’s UC Browser is the most popular of its kind in China with more than 65.9% market share, according to market researcher iResearch. It’s also the No. 1 browser in India with upwards of 34% market share, via StatCounter. It’s available in 11 languages (English, Russian, Indonesian, Vietnamese, etc.) and on all major mobile OS platform (iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Java, Blackberry, etc.). The browser prides itself in fast pageload and economic data consumption made available by its data compression technology and a cloud system. UC Browser has over 500 million users around the globe, as of March 2014.
In April 2014, UCWeb and Alibaba Group jointly announced the formation of a JV named Shenma Inc. (Chinese: 神马搜索; pinyin: Shénmǎ Sōusuǒ) that offers a mobile-only search engine in China.
In June 2014, UCWeb was acquired by Alibaba Group in the largest Chinese Internet merger deal through which UCWeb will form the Alibaba UC mobile business group by assimilating and consolidating part of mobile-related businesses within the Alibaba Group. After the merger, under the leadership of Yu Yongfu, chief executive of UCWeb since 2006, the Alibaba UC mobile business group will oversee the browser, search, location-based service, app store, mobile gaming and mobile reader operations.
In 2015 it was revealed as part of the Snowden leaks that UCBrowser leaks sensitive IMSI, IMEI and MSISDN data, which was used by intelligence agencies to track users.