Chinabyte.com worth $50 million

In Beijing yesterday for the American Business Media CEO China meeting. An interesting group there with talks from Reed's Jim Casella, Global Sources' Merle Hinrichs, Tom Gorman of Fortune China and two ladies from the start-up team for Reed's Variety in China.

Al Furst of Asian Projects was also speaking. He suggests that he and I are the only consultants covering B2B in Asia and that when, from time to time, a third emerges, we make special arrangements in Hong Kong to eliminate them. This is, of course, entirely untrue. After all, any special arrangements would best be made in Macau.

Al also talked about chinabyte.com, the partner in China of his client TechTarget. We've obviously been asleep at the wheel again, because we had missed the June announcement that Impress Holdings from Japan had bought 19.99% of that business for $10 million back in June. Shareholders in chinabyte's parent Yesky.com are News Corp., IDG Ventures, and two Chinese industry partners.

Of the 55 Asian B2B web sites we track, chinabyte.com ranks #7 with an estimated 790,000 useres. Its techtarget.com.cn site comes in at #20 with around 96,500.