Telstra invests in leading Chinese cloud services provider Qiniu

 27th October 2016– Telstra Ventures today announced it had completed a strategic investment in Qiniu, a leading cloud-storage service provider that offers data hosting and processing for enterprises in China and across Asia.

Matthew Koertge, Managing Director of Telstra Ventures, said the latest investment built on Telstra’s momentum in Asia, with five venture investments in the region in just over a year and the acquisition of leading Asian telecommunications services provider, Pacnet, in 2015. 

“The opportunities created by the digital explosion underway across Asia, particularly in the Chinese market, underpin this latest investment. With its unique, global-distributed architecture and bi-directional acceleration technology, Qiniu enables enterprise customers to collect, store and analyse huge amounts of data.”

“China is an important market for Telstra as we grow our international business.  In addition to our shareholding in leading online automobile business Autohome, Telstra has a presence in the Chinese enterprise and data centre market through our joint venture company, PBS.  We will now look for opportunities to work with Qiniu to enhance our offering both inside China and beyond,” said Mr Koertge.

Xu Shiwei, CEO of Qiniu, said the company welcomed the investment from Telstra as it opened up opportunities for collaboration to use Qiniu’s technologies to develop innovative products and services for Telstra customers in the region.

“Our mission is to redefine cloud computing and big data with ground-breaking technologies that make services faster, simpler and more reliable. Combining Telstra’s established cloud and network infrastructure and our innovative technology in cloud-storage should drive a lot of new business opportunities for both companies,” said Mr Xu.

Mr Koertge said he expected Telstra Ventures would continue grow its presence in Asia in line with Telstra’s international growth strategy and as rapid technology change opened up more opportunities in the region.

“Disruptive technologies and new business models are creating some incredibly exciting opportunities in Asia right now. When we started Telstra Ventures, most of our investment targets were based in the United States, but today Asia is increasingly important,” said Mr Koertge. 

“Since late 2014, we have invested in Singaporean-based Near and enepath, Gorilla Technology Group from Taiwan, and made a Limited Partner investment in the Monk’s Hill Ventures Innovation Fund for start-ups in South East Asia in areas like the mobile applications, cloud, security, IoT and other disruptive areas.”