Why is it so damn hard to understand China’s mobile market? Introducing the China App Index.

July 19, 2013 Leave a comment

Why is it so damn hard to understand China’s mobile market? Introducing the China App Index.

by KAI LUKOFF on 07/18/2013 · LEAVE A COMMENT

Two things stand out when I talk to foreign app developers about China:

They’re very excited about the opportunity;

They know almost nothing about the market.

If they’re so eager, then why is still so hard for them to understand the China market? First, to investigate a new market, a developer starts by reviewing the top app rankings on Google Play or the iTunes App Store. This works for nearly every market in the world, except for China. While Google Play is dominant in the rest of the world, it’s a small player in China, where Android is the vast majority of the market. The major mobile analytics firms (AppAnnie, Distimo, etc.) rely upon Google Play data, so they don’t really cover China either. Second, just as in PC internet, China is very different. If you look at the top apps in China, there’s nary a foreign app to be found. In other countries, there are many more global apps (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.) in those rankings. But foreign developers still have great opportunities in China. Among top games, foreign developers makeup roughly half. And the distribution channels (app stores), are far more open to foreign developers than the PC internet was. In the PC era, foreign game developers had to be represented by local Chinese publishers, which handicapped their access to the market (see the debacle between Blizzard & The9). Today, a foreign developer still needs to invest time to understand the market, but the regulatory barriers are not as great. So to help foreign developers understand the market, I launched at initiative at our China app store, Wandoujia. The China App Index is a monthly report with data for our top new and fastest-growing apps. But since lists alone can be a little dry, we’ve decided to pull out three catchy trends each month. For example, My WeChat ‘Moments’ (朋友圈) feed was recently flooded with pictures from the Baidu PhotoWonder celeb photo-comparison feature, so it made sense to highlight that as a trend among our fastest-growing apps.

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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