Alibaba, the giant B2B marketplace is planning to spin off HiChina, its domain-name and hosting service subsidiary for a potential IPO in the U.S. The Hangzhou based ecommerce company has submitted its proposal to the Hong Kong stock exchange today.
Back in 2009 Alibaba invested $79 million in HiChina for 85% of the company, a domain name register that is now extending its reaches into cloud-computing arena with site hosting initiative.
Jumping From Domain Selling To Cloud-Based Hosting
Founded all the way back in 1995, HiChina started out providing domain-name service with significant performance that more than 2.5 million customers registered over 2 million domain names through HiChina over the last 16 years.
In doing what it’s good at, namely selling domain names to companies as well as individuals, the Beijing-based company came to realize that for most of it’s corporate customers buying a domain name is just the first step towards eventually having a full-fledged website tailored to meet their needs.
After discerning the huge potential behind domain name service as well as receiving olive branches from Alibaba, HiChina kickstarted what it called “the Plan of Dreamworks”, an effort to simplify and streamline website building for small medium-sized businesses and individuals.
With a mission of “simplify website building for everyone” and a long term vision of “ serving businesses with one-stop internet services”, HiChina Dreamworks operates like a website building service trading platform, a Taobao-like marketplace for firms to find site builders or for site builders to list what they can offer.
For small businesses that want to strengthen their online presence but run on tight budget and with inadequate headcount, spending hundreds or thousands of RMB you can equipped yourself with a decent website just by shopping on HiChina Dreamworks website through couple of clicks. It’s cheap, convenient and easy to use.