Yahoo China users switch to alternatives

Three months from now, Yahoo will shut down its Chinese email service, meaning that millions of users here will have to prepare for an alternative. But that in fact is a very small number as the American conglomerate only holds less than 2 percent of the market share in China against tough local competition.

28 year old Wang Yan has been using her Yahoo account for more than 10 years. It was in fact the first email address she ever had.

"I started using Yahoo in college. But eventually more choices came along and now I'm also using many more accounts such as qq and gmail. I don't think I'm going to move my email content like Yahoo has suggested. It's too much trouble," Wang Yan said.

Users are advised to register with AliCloud, before the service is completely closed on Aug. 19. The recommended product is run by Alibaba, which became yahoo China's parent company in 2005, after reaching a deal with the American headquarters.

China has some 200 million email users, and nowadays it's rather common to have multiple mailbox accounts, as consumers' demands are changing all the time. Wang Yan's husband Wan Quan is also one of yahoo China's users who've been slowly driven away by its competitors.

"The closure won't affect me too much and I've migrated my account to alicloud. I chose yahoo China ten years ago because at the time there weren't many other free and quality options, but now I also use qq because it makes sending super size emails easy," Wan Quan said.

According to statistics, currently the top five e-mail services are all provided by domestic companies. Tecent QQ, Sina, and Sohu are some of Yahoo's most outstanding rivals. Not only has its email service rank dropped from number four to six from last year, its mainland employees have also been reduced by two thirds to about only 200 today, leaving just about some 30 people running the email service in China.