Most of the press Boston-based International Data Group (IDG), the world's largest information technology (IT) publisher, receives on the mainland these days concerns its venture capital activities.
IDG, with annual global revenues of US$2.5 billion, has invested US$120 million in 70 Chinese high-technology companies, including leading portal Sohu.com and online retailers 8848.net and dangdang.com. The company has pledged to increase its mainland venture capital investments to more than US$1 billion by 2006.
But in the mainland, IDG is, first and foremost, a publishing company. It is the profits from IDG's 22-title mainland publishing empire - arguably one of the quietest foreign investor success stories in the mainland - that are fuelling its venture capital business.
IDG founder and chairman Patrick McGovern first visited the mainland in 1978 on, he says, 'sort of a lark'. While poking around crowded Chinese bookstores, he was struck by 'the tremendous respect for learning and education in the country - and the fact that there were a billion people'.
IDG began its publishing business in 1967 with the launch of Computerworld in the United States. In the 1970s, the company decided it would grow through globalisation - a process it began by establishing a presence in Japan, Britain, France and West Germany.
'Basically, we just went down the list of countries according to their per capita gross domestic product,' Mr McGovern said. 'But then I went to China.' A year after that visit, IDG sent a team of experts to the mainland to give a series of technical lectures and demonstrations of IT.