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Asian streaming service scores $104 million in investment, hopes for further expansion

By | Published on Friday 29 August 2014

KKBOX

Asian streaming service KKBOX announced yesterday that it had raised a neat $104 million in new investment from the Singapore government’s investment corporation GIC. The new funds will be used to both enhance the platform’s technology and to fuel further global expansion.

In its original base of Taiwan, KKBOX was one of the early pioneers in streaming music, originally launching in 2004, slightly ahead of the Pandora internet radio service in the US, which emerged the following year (though Yahoo! had been dabbling with streaming music for a few years by that point). The Taiwanese service’s expansion into other Asian markets was aided by Japanese telecom giant KDDI Group becoming a significant shareholder in 2010.

KKBOX now operates in Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand and clearly has ambitions to expand further. Whether that means moving outside the Asian market isn’t clear, though as US and European services compete ever more aggressively in Asian territories, KKBOX will be hoping to remain a dominant player in the region.



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