Home Inns was spawned to meet the stay-over needs of Ctrip's target market of individual travelers.
Mr Liang is chief executive of Ctrip, one of China's most successful travel companies.
U.S.-listed Chinese companies with headquarters in Shanghai include travel company Ctrip and online job information provider 51job.
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Ctrip is well positioned to capture the fast growing opportunity in China travel market in the future.
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Ctrip has 20 employees ringing up hotels (3, 000 so far) to build the nation's first room-price database.
The Ctrip partners initially owned 55% of Home Inns, with a state-owned hotel-management outfit in Beijing holding 45%.
Larry McMillan's subscribers doubled their money in call options on Ctrip.com (CTRP) and United Airline's parent UAL Corp. (UAUA).
Ctrip's Nasdaq market cap is 3.4 times that of Expedia's local unit, Elong.
China search engine, Baidu (BIDU), said last week that it was acquiring CTrip rival Qunar for an undisclosed amount.
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The hotel chain was spun off from Ctrip in 2003, ahead of a planned U.S. public offering of the parent.
Ctrip's founders' answer: Home Inns, a Chinese-style economy hotel harking back to the U.S.' Howard Johnsons and Holiday Inns of the 1950s.
Ctrip also hawks tickets online, but its main focus is on service.
Shares of the China-based online travel agency Ctrip International are trading higher Friday morning on better-than-expected results for the fourth quarter.
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Ctrip also backs HanTing, another fast-growing Chinese budgetary hotel chain whose parent company, China Lodging Group, went public on NASDAQ just this March.
Shen spearheaded a spin-off of Home Inns from Ctrip.com, the online travel portal he-founded in 1999 and listed on NASDAQ in late 2003.
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Among the largest underlying components of GXC, in trading today Baidu ( BIDU) is up about 2.5%, and Ctrip.com International ( CTRP) is higher by about 6.3%.
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Ctrip shares are trading sharply lower this morning after the China-based online travel company provided disappointing guidance for the fourth quarter, and showed signs of eroding margins.
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Together, Baidu and Tencent threaten Ctrip, China's biggest travel firm.
Among the largest underlying components of GMF, in trading today Baidu Ads ( BIDU) is up about 2.2%, and Ctrip.com International Ltd ( CTRP) is higher by about 0.9%.
At least initially Home Inns will be hard-pressed to have the immense brand awareness of Ctrip, which has at least a third of the hotel-booking market for nontour-group travelers.
The company, CTrip (a Chinese equivalent of Expedia), decided to cut spending on expensive Shanghai office space by inviting some of its staff to work at home.
With its Ctrip ties, Home Inns is off to a fast start, but it will need to keep learning if it wants to maintain the pace in a cutthroat market.
Sweeping economic reforms are opening up demand for business travel, notes Yoshihisa Yamada, an executive director at Rakuten, Japan's number one online travel firm and a 20% owner of Ctrip.
He also cleaned up in Focus Media and Ctrip.com.
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