About 39 Health Net

39 Health Net

39 Health Net, published at 39.net and known in Chinese as Sanjiu Jiankang Wang, is a Guangzhou-based health news and information portal in Guangdong, China. Founded in 2000, it publishes medical news, disease databases, hospital and doctor directories and consumer health content, and adds interactive services — above all, facilities for users to ask doctors questions — to that publishing base. It was one of the first health websites in China, and its history, from a state-owned pharmaceutical company's early internet venture through venture-capital ownership to a RMB650 million acquisition, tracks the commercial development of online health information in China itself. Its official website is https://www.39.net.

Launched in March 2000 by the 999 Group

39 Health Net was launched in March 2000 by China's state-owned pharmaceutical company the 999 Group, according to TechNode's reporting of its later acquisition. The name connects the site to its founder: sanjiu, written with the characters for three and nine, is the Chinese name behind the 999 brand, and 39 is its numerical shorthand — a health network carrying its pharmaceutical parent's identity in its domain, 39.net. The launch came, as TechNode noted, shortly after a wave of Chinese internet companies such as Tencent, Alibaba, Sina and NetEase had been founded, and just as the dot-com bubble was about to burst. That 39.net survived that crash, when many early Chinese websites did not, is the first fact of its history: it was among the first health websites in China, and it outlasted the conditions in which it was born.

The founding logic was that of a pharmaceutical company moving its knowledge online. The site started, TechNode reported, by offering medical and health information — the publishing of reliable consumer health content for a public that, in 2000, was only beginning to search for such information on the internet. Everything 39 Health Net later became — its disease database, its directories, its doctor question services — was built on that original information service.

From information publishing to asking doctors

The decisive development in 39 Health Net's first decade was the move from one-way publishing to interaction. After starting with medical and health information, the site added features for users to ask doctors questions, TechNode reported. That change redefined what kind of outlet it was. A health information site competes on the quality and breadth of its articles; a site where readers put their own symptoms and concerns to doctors becomes a service as well as a publication, and builds the registered, returning audience that the site later reported in the hundreds of millions.

That interactive layer is still presented first on the current site. The services listed at the head of the 39.net homepage are Ask a Doctor, Find a Hospital, Check Diseases, symptom self-checking, a medicines guide and Find a Doctor, ahead of the news and department channels that follow. Online question-and-answer, organised by department — internal medicine, surgery, gynaecology and obstetrics, paediatrics, andrology, traditional Chinese medicine, the senses and infertility among them — remains a core part of the portal's structure, with recommended doctors presented alongside the questions.

Disease, hospital and doctor databases

Alongside its news, 39 Health Net maintains the structured databases that its task description in health-portal directories has long emphasised. Its operator, Guangzhou Qisheng Information Technology, is described in company directories as running a comprehensive online health service platform providing medical care information and services, with resources related to diseases, medications, hospitals and doctors, catering to health concerns including men's, women's and children's health. Each of those resources is a standing part of the live site. The disease-checking service organises conditions with explanations of their causes, symptoms and treatment, and offers a symptom self-check tool intended to point a user towards the appropriate department. The medicines service provides drug information. The hospital and doctor services let users search by city, hospital, department and keyword.

The scale the site claims for those directories is stated on its own homepage: its doctor-finding tool says it has collected 189 cities and 37,211 hospitals across the country. Those are the portal's own published figures, and they indicate the ambition of the database — not a Guangzhou-only directory, but a national hospital and doctor index operated from Guangzhou. For a reader, the practical sequence the site is built around runs from information to action: read about a condition, check symptoms against the disease database, then find the hospital and the doctor who treat it.

Health news and department channels

39 Health Net's editorial publishing is organised the way a hospital is organised — by department. Its channels include news, andrology, gynaecology, paediatrics, oncology, liver disease, kidney disease, stomach disease, anorectal medicine, diabetes, cardiovascular medicine, neurology, infertility, orthopaedics, skin, health care, diagnosis and treatment, weight management, women's health, men's health, diet and parenting, and its full department list extends further, to areas such as respiratory medicine, hepatology and hepatitis B, haematology, psychiatry, infectious disease, endocrinology, eye, dental and ear, nose and throat medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, emergency care and health examination. That department structure is more than navigation. It lets specialist editors publish for defined reader groups — parents in the parenting and paediatrics channels, for example, or readers managing a named chronic condition in the diabetes or liver channels — and lets advertisers and partners reach those groups precisely.

Within those channels the site publishes consumer health journalism in a popular register: explainers on infectious disease outbreaks, guidance on vaccination, reporting on conditions rising in prevalence in China, and myth-busting content, alongside video series in which named hospital doctors answer specific clinical questions. The homepage's video recommendations, presented with doctors' names, titles and hospitals — associate chief physicians of Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine among those shown — illustrate the portal's method of attaching professional identity to its health content, a trust signal that matters in medical publishing.

Ownership changes: IDG in 2006

39 Health Net's first ownership change followed its founder's restructuring. In 2006, when the 999 Group was under restructuring, 39.net introduced funding from IDG Capital Partners, a China-focused investment firm, which acquired the site for RMB30 million, according to reports cited by TechNode. The price is a useful historical marker. A health website founded six years earlier, in a sector then far from the centre of Chinese internet investment, was already a tradable asset with a professional venture-capital owner — and the valuation it would achieve eight years later shows how much the sector, and the site's audience, had grown in the interval.

Under that ownership the site operated from Guangzhou through its Guangzhou operating company, building the audience and revenue that made it an acquisition target. Guangzhou Qisheng Information Technology, identified in company directories as the operator behind 39 Health Net with www.39.net as its official website, represents that Guangzhou operating base in the site's corporate history.

Scale by 2013 and the Longmaster acquisition

By the time of its sale, 39 Health Net's reported scale was substantial. TechNode, citing 21cbn, reported that the site covered 120 million users, with 48 per cent of them on mobile — an early sign, in 2014, of the shift of health information seeking to phones. Its major revenue source was advertising, and its 2013 results were reported as revenue of RMB107 million, up 66 per cent, with net profit of RMB31 million, up 264 per cent, a net profit margin of 29 per cent. A profitable, fast-growing vertical portal with a large health audience was a rare asset, and it was reported that Baidu, China's largest search service — for which medical queries were a top revenue category — had also wanted to acquire it.

The buyer that succeeded was Longmaster Information and Technology Co. Ltd., a Chinese software developer founded in 1998. In June 2014 Longmaster announced it would acquire 39.net in cash and stock for a reported RMB650 million, more than US$100 million — over twenty times the RMB30 million valuation reported in 2006. Contemporary reporting in Alibaba Cloud's news archive described the transaction as Longmaster acquiring 100 per cent of the shares of the site's Guangzhou operating company for that consideration, and quoted Longmaster's chairman Wang Wei as saying that acquiring 39 Health Network was the first step in the company's official entry into the medical and health big data industry, valuing in particular the site's user data and its position as an entry point to mobile medical services. A later China Daily account of Longmaster's internet-hospital strategy likewise recorded the acquisition of 39.net for 650 million yuan and put the website's coverage at 160 million users.

Guangzhou base and national audience

39 Health Net is a Guangzhou outlet with a national readership. Its operating company is a Guangzhou company, its founder's identity is carried in its name, and its editorial product — a national hospital directory covering, by its own homepage count, 189 cities — is produced for readers across China rather than for Guangdong alone. That combination is characteristic of China's vertical portals: a single-city base, in this case the capital of Guangdong, publishing a national database and national news channels in a specialist field. The site's friendly links and partnerships, which include national health publications such as Health Times and Life Times listed on its homepage, place it within a national health-media network rather than a local one.

How readers use 39 Health Net

Readers use 39 Health Net in distinct ways, and the site is structured for each of them. A reader with a new symptom can use the symptom self-check and disease database to understand what the symptom may mean and which department treats it. A reader choosing care can search the hospital and doctor directories by city, hospital and department. A reader with a specific question can put it to a doctor through the ask-a-doctor service. And a reader simply keeping up with health can follow the news and department channels, from oncology and cardiovascular medicine to diet, weight management and parenting. Its operator's directory description summarises the same breadth: a comprehensive platform whose resources span diseases, medications, hospitals and doctors for men's, women's and children's health alike.

Standing and significance

39 Health Net's significance is historical as well as practical. Launched in March 2000 as one of China's first health websites, it pioneered the model that came to define Chinese online health media: free consumer health publishing, funded principally by advertising, deepened by structured disease, drug, hospital and doctor databases, and made interactive by doctor question services. Its ownership history — created by the state-owned 999 Group, bought with IDG Capital involvement for a reported RMB30 million in 2006, and acquired by Longmaster for a reported RMB650 million in 2014 — measures how valuable that model became as China's internet health audience grew into the hundreds of millions. From its Guangzhou base, 39 Health Net continues at 39.net to publish the medical news, databases and directories it was founded to provide.