Amazon has recently made some important updates to its China site – Joyo Amazon.  The company has renamed ‘Joyo Amazon’ to simply ‘Amazon,’ and has a new URL to match: “Z.cn.” It is believed that Amazon’s rebranding efforts means the company is ready to manage its global brand alone.

Joyo was actually started by Chinese Enterpreneur Lei Jun in the year 1999, and sold it to Amazon for $75 million.  In 2007 the site moved to the Amazon.cn domain – which is still in use today, despite the new short URL, and then became Joyo Amazon.  Giving his views on the changes, Lei said:

“Joyo: in January 1999, I established a small department within [anti-virus vendor] JinShan and began to experiment with the internet. My first idea was for Joyo to be a downloads site. The next idea was for e-commerce. In May 2000, I set up the independent company Joyo, firstly to sell movies, but that soon extended to books. It then became China’s leading [B2C] e-commerce site. In September 2004, it was sold to Amazon. Joyo shall forever remain in my heart. Best of luck to Amazon in China.”

While the names have been changed, it doesn’t affect Amazon’s business landscape.  For one, Wang Han-hua remains as Amazon’s country manager.

In addition to Amazon, there are several other companies that are making prominent developments in Asian markets.  For instance, Apple has established its tremendous retail presence in Asian Pacific markets, and is fast incurring a brand preference for its products among higher-income consumers.  Apple has also filed for a 10-K, which shows net sales in the Asia Pacific region rising to almost 174 percent in 2011 as compared to 2010.  Besides, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook is quite optimistic about his company’s prospects in China, which are very strong right now.

“In my lifetime I’ve never seen a country with as many people rising into the middle class aspiring to buy products that Apple makes,” Cook said. “It’s an area of enormous opportunity. It has quickly become No. 2 on our list of top revenue countries very, very quickly.”

Next, Juniper Networks is also looking to make some acquisitions in Asia this year to beef up its mobile and cloud portfolio.  Juniper made five acquisitions last year, including Ankeena Networks and handset security software firm SMobile Systems.

And the road can be traveled both ways. China-based Papaya Mobile has also seen a whopping growth rate of 940 percent increase since last year. As Papaya Mobile expands its gaming platform, the company is making its social development toolkits available to iOS developers as beta release.  This will connect users on both platforms for in-game features such as challenges, game invites and leader boards.  With this, developers will have access to PapayaMobile’s new Gateway to China program which localizes, distributes and promotes Western games in the Chinese market.