Google's new office in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province, is intended to foster the U.S. search engine's hardware development, a senior company executive said on Tuesday.
The new office in Shenzhen, known as China's Silicon Valley, will not be a technology research facility but will instead facilitate hardware development efforts between Google and other high-technology companies in the city, Scott Beaumont, Google's greater China president, told reporters at an event in Beijing held to release the BrandZ Top 50 Chinese Global Brand Builders report.
The study, undertaken by WPP and Kantar Millward Brown, in collaboration with Google, revealed that Lenovo topped the ranking, beating out Huawei, Alibaba, Xiaomi and Air China, which made up the rest of the top five domestic brands.
In terms of brand awareness, Huawei, DJI and Oppo saw the fastest increases, a sign of Shenzhen's growing influence in the global technology arena.
Google already has sites in Shanghai and Beijing. The third office it is opening in Shenzhen is considered the company's latest move to expand into the Chinese mainland market after it announced in December plans to open its first Asian artificial intelligence (AI) center in Beijing.
At another event in Beijing on the same day, Li Jia, head of research and development at Google Cloud AI, said that hiring for Google's Beijing AI center has begun and the company hopes to work with talented people to push for China's AI development.
