About ZOL

ZOL

ZOL, published at zol.com.cn and known in full as Zhongguancun Online, is a technology news and product-data portal based in Beijing, China. Founded in March 1999, it takes its name from Zhongguancun, the Beijing district long known as China's technology hub, and it publishes IT news, product reviews, prices and channel business coverage for the Chinese technology market. Over its history it has passed through the hands of some of the largest media owners in the world — it was acquired by CNET Networks in 2004, became part of CBS Interactive when CBS bought CNET in 2008, and in 2015 it was sold on to HC Network in a deal valued at 1.5 billion yuan. Through all of those changes of ownership, the product itself remained recognisably the same: a database-driven technology portal where Chinese readers check what a product is, how it performs and what it costs, and where the IT trade follows its own market.

Origins in Zhongguancun

ZOL was founded in 1999 — its own anniversary material records that the site marked its tenth anniversary in 2009 — in Beijing, and its name ties it directly to Zhongguancun. That district in Haidian, in the north-west of the capital, was where China's personal-computer trade concentrated: the electronics markets, distributors and retailers through which computers and components reached Chinese buyers. A portal named after Zhongguancun was therefore announcing its subject and its audience at once. It would cover the products sold in those markets, publish the prices at which they were offered, and report on the channel — the distributors and dealers — that moved them. The full founding date recorded for the portal is March 1999, which places ZOL among the first generation of Chinese vertical websites, created in the same early period as China's big general portals but aimed at a single, information-hungry subject: information technology.

What ZOL publishes

The portal's output has four main strands. The first is IT news: product launches, company developments and industry stories affecting the Chinese technology market. The second is reviews and testing of products themselves, the evaluative layer that tells a reader how a computer, phone, camera or component performs. The third is product data and prices — structured specifications and market pricing that let readers compare models directly. The fourth, and one that sets ZOL apart from purely consumer-facing sites, is channel business coverage: reporting aimed at the distribution trade itself, the dealers and distributors for whom Zhongguancun was the physical marketplace. That trade audience explains why ZOL developed local and channel-oriented services alongside its national consumer content, and why its managers, in interviews about the site's future, discussed expanding its branch-station network of local coverage. The portal is therefore both a consumer buying guide and a trade publication for China's IT distribution business.

Acquisition by CNET Networks

On 14 October 2004, CNET Networks announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the assets of ZOL and of Fengniao, which operated the photography site fengniao.com, in cooperation with Chinese subsidiaries and affiliates. The two transactions together totalled US$16 million in cash payments, to be paid over the following two quarters, and were effective immediately. CNET's announcement described ZOL as one of the leading providers of online personal technology-related content and shopping services in northern China, and Fengniao as one of China's leading digital photography properties. CNET said it planned to cross-market ZOL and Fengniao with its established businesses in China, aiming to expand the audiences and advertiser relationships of both its new and existing products. The deal took a locally founded Beijing portal and placed it inside an American technology-media group whose brands included some of the best-known technology publications in the English-speaking world.

Inside CNET China and CBS Interactive

ZOL's team formally joined CNET China in 2004, and the portal sat within a stable of Chinese technology media that, by 2006, was described by the executive responsible for it as including ZOL, PChome, Fengniao and several regional IT sites. In 2008 the ownership above ZOL changed again: CBS Corporation acquired CNET Networks for US$1.8 billion, and CBS announced on 1 July 2008 that it had completed the acquisition and merged CNET's operations into an expanded CBS Interactive division. ZOL therefore spent the next several years as a Chinese asset of CBS Interactive, an unusual position for a Beijing product-data portal, and one that shaped its branding and corporate reporting during that period. In October 2008, during the CBS Interactive era, Zhongguancun Online bought the top-level domain zol.com for a sum reported in Chinese coverage as running into millions, a move its management described at the time as protecting and promoting the ZOL brand and as part of the preparations for the site's tenth anniversary the following year; the portal had until then been known principally by its zol.com.cn address, which remains its main domain.

Scale and public profile

By the middle of the following decade ZOL was presenting itself as one of China's leading IT and consumer electronics portals. When the inaugural CES Asia was held in 2015, ZOL was named an official media partner of the show alongside Shanghai Media Group and The Wall Street Journal, and it produced the Best of CES Asia Awards, with senior editors from ZOL evaluating submitted products and winners announced on site. The announcement for that partnership described ZOL as the largest IT and digital portal site in North China — a description of its regional strength consistent with CNET's original 2004 characterisation of the site — and quoted its managing director, Liu Xiaodong, describing ZOL as the leading IT and consumer electronics web portal in China. Such partnership roles are significant for a product-data portal: judging awards at a major consumer-electronics show is an extension of the same evaluative function the site performs in its reviews, carried into the industry's public events.

The 2015 sale to HC Network

ZOL's time inside an American media group ended in 2015. Reporting of the transaction records that ZOL became formally independent of CBS Interactive on 1 February 2015, and that on 17 March 2015 HC Network — HC Net, one of China's oldest business-to-business enterprises — announced it had reached an agreement to acquire Zhongguancun Online for 1.5 billion yuan. The assets covered by the deal were reported to include the main domain zol.com.cn, the zol.com domain and the ea3w.com site, among other assets, with HC Network to pay 30 percent in cash and the remaining 70 percent through additional shares. The agreement was reported to include commitments that net profit in the three years after the deal would reach 100 million yuan, 130 million yuan and 170 million yuan respectively. Chinese coverage noted that this was the third time in fifteen years that ZOL had been acquired under its long-serving leadership, and that its general manager held a 60 percent shareholding, the largest single stake. HC Network's stated logic, as reported at the time, was expansion into the transaction side of the market: Zhongguancun Online, as a large vertical IT website, also carried e-commerce services and a strong reputation.

The Zhongguancun name and the channel tradition

To understand ZOL's content, it helps to understand what Zhongguancun meant. The district was the physical centre of China's computer trade — the place where components were wholesaled, machines were assembled to order and prices were discovered by walking the markets. A website carrying that name inherited the trade's information problems: thousands of products, constantly shifting prices, and buyers and dealers who needed a common reference. ZOL's product database and price listings are the digital form of that reference function, and its channel reporting is the digital form of trade journalism for the same community. That is why, even after the physical electronics markets declined in importance and the portal passed through foreign ownership, the Zhongguancun name was retained and the zol.com domain was bought to protect it: the brand's authority came from its identification with the district where China's PC business began.

How the portal is used

For an ordinary reader, ZOL works as a research tool. A purchase typically starts with a category — a laptop, a handset, a camera, a component — and proceeds through specifications, comparison with rival models, review material and current prices. For a reader in the trade, the same site supplies market news and channel information relevant to distribution decisions. For manufacturers, the portal is an advertising and presentation environment aimed at an audience that has already declared an interest in technology products. These three uses — consumer research, trade information and industry marketing — coexist on the same pages, which is the defining feature of the Chinese vertical-portal model that ZOL helped to establish from 1999 onward. Its longevity through three changes of ownership suggests that the underlying service, an authoritative product and price reference for the Chinese IT market, kept its value regardless of who owned it.

ZOL among Chinese technology portals

ZOL's historical position can be measured against its peers. When Baidu's rankings of Chinese technology media influence were reported by Qingdao Daily in connection with the much younger site ITHome, the order given was Zhongguancun Online first and PConline second, with ITHome third — a snapshot that placed ZOL at the head of China's established technology portals. CNET's description of the site in 2004 as a leading provider of technology content and shopping services in northern China, and the CES Asia partnership description in 2015 calling it the largest IT and digital portal in North China, bookend a decade in which the site held that regional and national standing under foreign ownership. Founded in March 1999 in Beijing, built on the product and price information needs of the Zhongguancun trade, and still published at zol.com.cn, ZOL remains one of the foundational names of Chinese technology media.