About PCPOP

PCPOP

PCPOP (泡泡网, pcpop.com) is a Chinese-language consumer technology portal based in Beijing, China. Founded in 2000, it publishes news, reviews, benchmarks and buying guides for computers, computer components and peripherals, mobile phones and digital cameras, supported by extensive product specification databases. Alongside Zhongguancun Online (ZOL) and IT168, it formed part of the generation of Beijing IT portals that defined Chinese online technology publishing in the 2000s. It is also famous beyond its own readership as the first company of Li Xiang, the entrepreneur who went on to found Autohome and the electric-vehicle maker Li Auto. Its official website is https://www.pcpop.com.

PCPOP's proposition was the one every serious technology buyer of its era needed. Computers and digital products were expensive, models multiplied faster than any magazine could track, and specifications decided value. A website that published fast news, tested products honestly, kept a complete database of what was on sale, and told readers what to buy — and published it all before its rivals — could own that reader. PCPOP built exactly that, from a teenager's bedroom in Shijiazhuang.

A high-school student's website

PCPOP's founder, Li Xiang, was born in 1981 in Shijiazhuang, Hebei. As he later told the story on his public Weibo account, quoted by KrASIA and CarNewsChina, his teachers and relatives thought he was good for nothing because his academic performance was poor, so he started a personal website to avoid being looked down on. He gave his spare time in high school to computers and the internet, contributed to IT media, and ran the site from his parents' home.

The hobby paid unusually early. Accounts of his career agree that in 1999, aged 18, his personal website was already earning money from online advertising — KrASIA puts the figure at more than RMB 100,000 a year, more than ten times what his parents, a schoolteacher and a theatre-troupe director in the usual telling, earned. He decided not to take the college entrance examination, with his parents' support, and turned the project into a business. The home project became PCPop.com in 1999 in CarNewsChina's account; Chinese profiles date the formal step to 2000, when he registered PCPOP — the Bubble Net, Paopao Wang — and began operating it as a company. The two dates describe the same transition, from personal site to registered portal, and 2000 is the founding year the portal itself is dated by.

For its first years Li ran the business from his parents' home in Shijiazhuang. Then he moved the operation to Beijing — Chinese profiles put the move in late 2001 or 2002, when he left his parents, rented a proper office in the capital and began formal business operation and hiring. Beijing, and specifically its Zhongguancun technology district, was where China's IT trade, its advertising money and its rival portals were. From Beijing, according to a contemporary profile of the young chief executive, PCPOP's advertising sales grew by more than 100 per cent a year.

The third IT portal: speed and independence

By the middle of the 2000s, that profile could describe PCPOP as the third major Chinese IT professional website — behind Zhongguancun Online and Pacific Online's PConline, the two leaders Li himself concluded he could not overtake — and report that in 2005 its revenue was nearly RMB 20 million with profit of RMB 10 million, figures that, on a twenty-times earnings multiple, made the 24-year-old founder's company worth some RMB 200 million and Li himself worth more than RMB 100 million. Those are the contemporary profile's numbers, and they capture the scale of the business PCPOP had become within five years of registration.

The same profile identified two working rules behind the growth. The first was speed. Li required PCPOP's articles to come out before other media — even five minutes faster than others counted — and his own routine, by his later account, was to wake at 5 a.m. daily to seize early-morning traffic from competitors. The second was editorial independence as a commercial claim: the profile reported Li's boast that PCPOP was the only IT network medium that did not collect money from manufacturers, and that anyone on the team who took such money would be pushed out automatically. In a market where readers suspected, often with reason, that reviews followed advertising, a public no-money-from-manufacturers rule was a differentiator a buying-guide site could build trust on.

The profile also noted what PCPOP did not have. Rivals that had stopped or disappeared were gone; the two leaders ahead of it relied on big media or electronics-market resources; PCPOP, it said, was purely endogenous growth — built from its own earnings rather than a parent group's money. That independence is part of why the founder's next decision, to use PCPOP as the platform for something bigger, mattered so much.

News, reviews, benchmarks and the product database

The content model PCPOP settled into is the classic model of the Chinese IT portal, and the one its official site still presents. It publishes technology news as products launch; reviews and benchmarks of computers, components, peripherals, phones and cameras, in which performance is measured and compared; buying guides and product recommendations that translate those measurements into a purchasing decision; market and price coverage that follows what products actually sell for; tutorials and how-to material; and community discussion around all of it. Chinese descriptions of its homepage summarise the same offer: a comprehensive technology portal bringing together the latest technology information, digital product evaluations, industry developments and purchase guidance, where users can find detailed information and review reports on new phones, tablets and cameras.

Underneath the articles sits the database. A portal of this kind maintains a structured library of products — models, specifications, photographs and prices — against which reviews, comparisons and guides are written. For a reader choosing between near-identical graphics cards, laptops or cameras, the ability to compare full specifications side by side was, before the smartphone era put a shopping app in every pocket, one of the most useful services on the Chinese internet, and building and maintaining those databases over two decades is a large part of what a portal like PCPOP is.

The categories themselves date the portal's world. It was built for the desktop-computer era — motherboards, graphics cards, displays, peripherals — and extended naturally into the digital products that followed the PC: mobile phones, digital cameras, tablets and other consumer electronics. Telstra, when it bought into the business in 2008, described PCPop.com in exactly those terms, as a popular digital device site, paired with Autohome as its automotive counterpart.

A Beijing portal in a crowded market

PCPOP's move to Beijing placed it in the most competitive technology-publishing market in China. The contemporary profile of Li Xiang names the field plainly: some earlier rivals, it said, had already stopped or disappeared, while the two portals ahead of PCPOP — Zhongguancun Online and Pacific Online — relied on big media or electronics-market resources that PCPOP did not have. IT168, operated by Norstar Media, was the other digital-device site foreign investors grouped with PCPOP when Telstra bought into both businesses in 2008. To survive in that company as an independent, PCPOP had to be faster and more trusted than better-funded rivals, which is why its founder turned speed of publication and refusal of manufacturer money into stated rules rather than private preferences. The market also explains the portal's form: Beijing's IT trade generated the launches, review samples, price movements and advertising that a database-driven buying-guide site lived on, and being in the capital put PCPOP's editors and sales staff where that trade was done.

Autohome: the car channel that outgrew its parent

In the mid-2000s Li Xiang made the decision for which PCPOP is now best remembered. Judging, as later profiles recount, that he could not become number one in IT portals, he looked for an adjacent field where a vertical site could lead, considered property and travel, and chose cars. Preparation began at the end of 2004; in 2005 PCPOP expanded from IT products into the automobile industry, launching a car channel that became Autohome (汽车之家). The channel grew so fast that in 2007 it was separated as a stand-alone company, the year the experienced manager Qin Zhi joined to run it.

Autohome went on to become the most visited car website in the world by the measures of its time — Chinese profiles record monthly coverage of 80 million users by the end of 2012 — and on 11 December 2013 it listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Li served as its president until June 2015. None of that diminishes PCPOP; it reframes it. The portal was the training ground, the cash engine and the organisational template — vertical content, product databases, buying decisions, advertising — for one of the most successful Chinese internet companies of the following decade, and its founder has been explicit that the automotive business grew directly out of a PCPOP section.

Telstra takes control in 2008

PCPOP's independence ended, in ownership terms, in June 2008. On 27 June 2008 Australia's Telstra announced that it had acquired 55 per cent — controlling stakes — in two Chinese internet businesses: Norstar Media, operator of the car site Che168.com and the digital device site IT168.com, and Autohome/PCPop, founded by Li Xiang and operator of Autohome.com.cn and PCPop.com. The price was not disclosed; Telstra's chief executive said the acquisitions cost less than half what Telstra had paid for 51 per cent of the property site SouFun in 2006. Contemporary Chinese commentary described the deal in starker terms — PCPOP, which had earlier explored a listing that did not happen, had in effect been sold, and Li's main energies moved to Autohome while the portal he founded was left to others to run.

The Telstra deal is revealing about how PCPOP was valued from outside. Telstra grouped its Chinese holdings by advertising segment — property through SouFun, cars through Autohome and Che168, and digital devices through PCPOP and IT168 — and said the stakes gave it a strong strategic position in the internet advertising market of the world's most populous nation. PCPOP's worth to a foreign telecoms group was not its fame but its segment: it was one of the leading addresses through which Chinese consumers researched digital devices, and therefore one of the places device advertising had to be.

Telstra later increased and then exited its position in the wider Autohome business, selling its remaining Autohome stake to Ping An in 2016. PCPOP itself continued operating under its own name and domain throughout — the portal outlasted the ownership changes around its founder's group, as it had outlasted the dot-com winter of its founding years.

Li Xiang after PCPOP

The founder's subsequent career is part of PCPOP's record because it began there. Li resigned as Autohome's president in 2015 and founded Chehejia, the company renamed Li Auto — its Chinese name, Li Xiang, a homonym of his own — which listed on Nasdaq on 30 July 2020, raising about USD 1.1 billion. He had also been a founding investor in rival electric-car maker Nio, investing USD 15 million after declining a co-founder role in 2014. KrASIA's profile of him places him among the emblematic Chinese entrepreneurs born after 1980, and traces the whole trajectory back to its first line: a high-school student, written off by his teachers, starting a personal website. That website was PCPOP.

It is worth being precise about what that lineage does and does not mean. PCPOP did not become Li Auto, and its editorial business is separate from the car companies. But the skills the portal taught — publishing faster than competitors, refusing compromised reviews, building product databases buyers trust, and choosing a vertical and intending to be first in it — are the skills its founder himself carried, by his own account, into each later company. PCPOP is where the method was formed.

PCPOP's place in Chinese tech publishing

PCPOP continues to operate as a specialist hardware and digital-products news site, publishing in Chinese from Beijing for readers researching computers and consumer electronics. Its historical place is secure on three grounds. It was, by contemporary accounts, one of the three major Chinese IT professional websites of the 2000s, in company with ZOL and PConline, and part of the small group of Beijing portals — ZOL, IT168 and PCPOP among them — through which a generation of Chinese consumers learned to research technology purchases online. It proved that an independent, founder-built portal with no media-group parent could reach that rank on speed and perceived honesty. And it incubated Autohome inside its own pages, making it a direct ancestor of China's largest automotive internet business. Few portals can claim a founder, a spin-off and a quarter-century of continuous publication. PCPOP can claim all three.