Google still has great interest in serving the Chinese mainland market and it is striving to develop government relations in the country, Alphabet Inc's leader said during a tech conference in Beijing on Monday.
"It's interesting that Google never left China, and we continue to have more than 500 employees here," said Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet, during a TechCrunch event. Schmidt noted that the company has a lot of partners in the country and its servers are mainly in Hong Kong.
In August, Google Inc announced it would operate under a new structure. It created a new parent company called Alphabet in the same month, according to an announcement on the tech giant's website on August 10.
Google's global website was blocked for the first time in the mainland in June 2009, and almost a year later, the search engine announced it would redirect its Chinese users to its Hong Kong site, media reports said.
With the emergence of Chinese tech firms and startups, Schmidt noted that the level of entrepreneurial activity in China is surprising and probably close to the highest in the world. The Chinese government is increasing investment in science and engineering studies, which have become an important driver of innovation, he noted.
