China’s UCWeb Celebrates 8th Birthday by Giving Away Xiaomi Mi2 Phone

Birthdays are always a day of reflections for startups. The CEO of the popular Chinese mobile browser, UCWeb, Yu Yongfu, weibo-ed today about his company’s eighth birthday with a thank you message.

The weibo post was greeted with a lot of comments – over 6,000 of them, with over 21,000 retweets as I write this. It could be just enthusiastic UCweb fans, or it could be because Yu is giving away a Xiaomi Mi2 to one lucky fan on Weibo, courtesy of Lei Jun. The celebration comes with this cutesy poster which explains its mascot’s birthday wishes:

1. Hope that half of the world will use UC to log on to the web
2. Wishing folks who retweet his weibo good luck
3. Hoping CC bear (his girlfriend) can be more tender and loving towards him!

UCWeb has come quite a long way in its eight years of operation, both in China and around the world. The company claims to have over 40 million international active app users when we last reported in April this year, targeting smartphone owners mainly in the U.S., Indonesia, and India.

In recent months, there were rumors that Baidu might acquire UCWeb, but that doesn’t look to be happening as the company declared that it is looking to IPO in the U.S. next year. If you’re interested to find out more about UCWeb’s strategy, you should check out this interview where our own Charlie Custer sat down with Yu back in May.