Briefs | Yum Brands plans to spin off China business

The owner of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell plans to spin off its China business into a separate, publicly traded company. Shares of Yum Brands Inc. gained more than 4 percent in yesterday premarket trading. Yum Brands said that it believes the China business, called Yum China, could grow from its current 6,900 restaurants to more than 20,000 restaurants in the future. The remaining Yum Brands business will concentrate part of its efforts on becoming more of a franchisor, with the goal of having at least 95 percent of its restaurants owned and operated by franchisees by the end of 2017. It currently has more than 41,000 restaurants globally. The separation of the businesses is expected to be complete by the end of next year.

Google makes first mainland investment since 2010 pullout

Google is making its first direct investment in a Chinese startup, an artificial-intelligence developer, since mostly quitting the country in 2010 over censorship concerns. Google is leading a round of funding for Mobvoi Inc., a company operating a Chinese-language voice-activated search engine. Google used Mobvoi instead of its own blocked service in the Moto 360 smartwatch released in China in June. The deal underscores how Google may be edging back into the world’s largest mobile market with its first strategic investment in years. In 2014, a growth equity arm of the corporation called Google Capital invested in InnoLight Technology Corp., a Suzhou-based company that makes high-speed data transmission hardware “Mobvoi is very excited to welcome Google as an investor as both companies share a long-term view on technologies,” Li Zhifei, a company co-founder and former Google employee, said in a statement without specifying the amount that the Mountain View, California-based company is investing.