Time Warner unit AOL is working on a new Internet business strategy that it would eventually use in foreign markets, Time Warner's CEO said on Monday, outlining a move that would reverse a long retreat to AOL's US base. "We've been working with AOL to try and see if we can't create an Internet portal strategy that we can then expand outside the US in other countries," Time Warner Inc Chief Executive Officer Richard Parsons told Reuters on the sidelines of the Fortune Global Forum in Beijing. Any new global initiative would reverse several years of retrenchment for the once high-flying AOL, an Internet business that sharply scaled back its overseas activity after the tech bubble burst.
As part of that retrenchment, the company eventually pulled out of a $200 million joint venture to develop an Internet service in China with the country's leading PC maker, Lenovo Group Ltd.
Parsons did not detail the new strategy, but AOL is already moving away from an old model offering exclusive services for fee-paying members. Recent initiatives have made it more like Internet giants such as Google Inc and Yahoo Inc, which make their money through such means as ad sales and transactions.
It is making more of its sites and services available to anyone with Internet access and, in one of its latest moves, is preparing to offer free e-mail similar to services already available from Yahoo, Google and Microsoft.
Several potential suitors have reportedly expressed interest over the years in buying AOL from Time Warner, a media conglomerate whose assets range from Time magazine to the Warner Bros. movie studio and the CNN news network.
But Parsons has refused such offers, preferring to keep the asset - whose name was once almost synonymous with the Internet in the United States - in hopes of turning it into a major money earner.
Despite the failure of its China venture with Lenovo, Parsons said that AOL would like to eventually return to the Chinese market, the world's second largest, with about 100 million users.
"It's growing fast," he said. "It's just a question of how to position ourselves in that market."
Parsons added that Time Warner was pleased with initial progress at its CETV television station, nearly two years after it sold a controlling stake in the venture to Hong Kong-based media company Tom Group Ltd.
The sale, seen at the time as another part of Time Warner's global retrenchment, included an option for the US company to eventually buy back control of the venture, one of only a handful of foreign-owned TV stations allowed to broadcast to a mass Chinese audience.
Parsons would not say whether Time Warner would exercise that option.
"I don't know at this moment in time, but we're very optimistic about how CETV is going," he said.
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