Cheetah Mobile, headquarter in Beijing and listed in New York, chartered the ship from Costa to take the thousands of employees on a six-day, five-night trip to South Korea and Japan, Caixin news reported.
The vessel left Tianjin port on January 27, making stops at South Korea’s Busan and Japan’s Fukuoka before returning to China on February 1, a week before the first day of Chinese New Year on February 8.
Some employees of Cheetah Mobile were quoted as saying that many of them have never been outside of China and the company wanted them to gain some exposure to the outside world.
While there was no confirmed figure on how much Cheetah Mobile has spent on the cruise trip, a source close to the matter revealed it could be in the tens of millions of Chinese yuan (RMB10m = US$1.5m).
In 2014, Cheetah Mobile organised a company trip for its employees to Sanya, a resort island-city in southern China, also before Chinese New Year.
