Yahoo To Shut Down Its Email Service In World's Most Populous Country

Bangalore: Yahoo is all set to close its email services in China by this summer as a part of the agreement with its partner Alibaba Group, one of China's biggest Internet companies. This service is scheduled to close on August 19, reports Huffington Post.

Yahoo has started recommending its users in China to opt for another service provider such as Aliyun, an email service provider suggested as an alternative by the Alibaba Group. The company, since 2005 wanted to phase out of China after it handed over its website, email and other services over to Alibaba. As a part of that deal, Yahoo had acquired Alibaba's 40 percent stake paying around $1 billion.

The investment decision made by Yahoo by acquiring the stake is proved to be a good deal, as the company made a huge profit of $7.6 billion by selling half of its stake back to Alibaba last year. Analysts believe the remaining half of the stakes is now worth even more, predicted to be about $14 billion.

Alibaba is considering going public in the coming two years which would give an opportunity for Yahoo to sell more of its holdings.

In the same line, Yahoo has announced shutting down few of its other products and services in U.S. too which is low profitable and are not used by many. This in turn, would help the company to reduce its cost and thereby allowing its engineers to work more on other profit making apps and mobile products.