Yahoo pulls out of China

Follows LinkedIn to the exit door

Yahoo has closed its operations in China, citing an "increasingly challenging business and legal environment".

The move follows Microsoft's decision last month to shut down LinkedIn for its claimed 54 million users in the country, saying: "We're … facing a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China."

Yahoo's web assets are no longer accessible in China, but the company says its sites elsewhere are unaffected.

"Yahoo remains committed to the rights of our users and a free and open internet. We thank our users for their support," a spokesperson said.

The move marks the end of a slow diminution of Yahoo's services in China, with email and news services being closed down in 2013 and the firm's Beijing offices shutting up shop in 2015, around the same time it was facing problems in its home market, eventually being sold at a reduced price to Verizon for $4.8 billion in 2016.

Prior to that, the company, had been a big investor in the Chinese internet giant Alibaba.

The Chinese government has been cracking down on tech companies both domestic and foreign, seeking to break monopolies and assert control over content.

The latest of these measures, the Personal Information Protection Law, came into force this month. It introduces a number of new requirements about how data can be collected and stored, with foreign firms required to appoint a dedicated representative in China to be responsible for ensuring compliance. Transgression of PIPL could attract a fine of up to 5 per cent of annual turnover.

As well as new laws like PIPL, Chinese tech firms such as Alibaba and Tencent have also been hit by the government's five-year plan, which includes investigations into internet finance, artificial intelligence, big data and cloud computing and a drive to end private monopolies in technology and education.

In April, Alibaba was fined £2bn in an anti-monopoly case and more recently, Tencent was ordered to end its exclusive music licencing deals. At the same time, there has been a crackdown on the types of content allowed on those and other platforms.