Baidu and other tech firms to invest $12b in China Unicom

BAIDU and JD.com will join other big Chinese technology firms to jointly invest about $12 billion in the Shanghailisted unit of China Unicom, the weakest of three big stateowned telecoms firms, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said. The move is part of the Chinese government’s drive to rejuvenate state behemoths with private capital. Beijing added China Unicom last year to a first batch of state-owned enterprises to see mixed-ownership reform. China Unicom, formally known as China United Network Communications Group Co Ltd, is one of the world’s largest mobile carriers by user numbers, but its recent earnings have struggled in a fiercely competitive market. The carrier is widely seen as over-staffed, inefficient and slow to develop key technologies. It already lags state-owned China Mobile and China Telecom, and private firms have moved ahead in developing cloud and big data services, and mobile software. Reuters reported last month that Alibaba Group Holdings and Tencent Holdings would be among new investors putting a total of about $10 billion into China United Network Communications Ltd, China Unicom’s Shanghai-listed unit. That total is likely to rise to about 80 billion yuan ($11.8 billion), with Baidu, China’s biggest internet search provider, investing about 10 billion yuan ($1.48 billion), and JD.com, the country’s second-largest e-commerce company, putting in about 5 billion yuan, one of the people said.