From Beijing to Bharat
Chinese app
makers are rapidly making inroads into India’s small towns and villages seeking
to capture the country’s next billion internet users that the likes of Google
too are chasing.
After selling a company he cofounded to Alibaba in
2013, Sichuan-born Forrest Chen wanted to look beyond China for his next
venture. India was one of the countries on his list of potential markets, which
included the US, the UK, Indonesia and Thailand.
“We launched NewsDog in the US in 2015 and got 10,000
users but realised soon that retention was bad because of so much competition,”
said Chen, CEO of NewsDog. “That is when we decided to come to India, since the
number of (digital) media houses here were fewer and people were still using
traditional media.”
After launching here in 2016, first in English,
NewsDog has expanded to 10 Indian languages and has 18 million monthly active
users, making it one of the top news apps in the country.
A slew of Chinese companies and entrepreneurs has
quickly moved to launch mobile applications directly in India to capture the
rapidly swelling next generation of internet users—a demographic global and
Indian internet companies too are chasing. Several of these Chinese apps have
catapulted to the top in India across categories such as entertainment (Tik
Tok, Vigo Video), news (UC News, NewsDog), shopping (Club Factory, Shein), as
well as browsers and data sharing (UC Browser, Shareit).
“China has seen maturity of content apps that are
consumed widely there. With (many) Indians just waking up to digital content on
their mobile phones, the Chinese have a head start to port their apps to
India,” said Sreedhar Prasad, partner and head for internet business and
ecommerce at KPMG India.
“Especially in tier 2 cities and beyond, the use of
apps that let consumers make short videos or edit images simply and share them
is catching on fast. Many of the Chinese apps have been able to cater to this,”
he added.
Of course, this would not have been possible without
high-speed data connectivity and smartphones becoming more accessible to
millions of Indians than ever before. The number of internet users in India is
expected to increase to about 500 million this year from about 481 million in December,
according to a report in March by the Internet and Mobile Association of India
and consultancy firm Kantar IMRB.
Chinese app company ByteDance has launched Tik Tok
(over 1 million Android installations) and Vigo Video (over 5 million Android
installations) in India to let users upload short videos. Other Chinese apps in
the same space such as Kwai are also raking up millions of users in India.
For these Chinese companies, the attraction of a
large market, several untapped use-cases for non-metro consumers, and a growing
internet base are good enough to place big bets in India.
Chen said it was the growing internet phenomenon and
a lack of disruption by traditional media that attracted him to the Indian
market.
“When I went to rural places around Gurgaon with my
COO Yi Ma, we found that a lot of people have smartphones and they use it very
regularly. However, they are still reading newspapers. That’s when we realised
there is a gap, which we are trying to fill,” Chen said.
Some of these Chinese apps, though, host content some
would consider objectionable, and experts say these platforms cannot sustain
solely on such material. TikTok was temporarily banned in Indonesia last month
due to inappropriate content shared on the app. A highprofile Chinese investor,
who did not want to be identified, said these apps may have only a short shelf
life in India.
“We have faced some criticism over the content, and
we understand that such content harms us,” Chen said. “We are trying to cut it
out using artificial intelligence.”
Chinese ecommerce apps such as Club Factory and Shein
are also seeing thousands of orders daily from India.
For Club Factory, 35 million of its 70 million global
customers are from India. “Our focus is towards a value-based customer, which
by default includes tier 2 and 3 cities,” Ashwin Rastogi, country head for the
ecommerce app, told ET in an interaction last month.
Club Factory is the eighth most used shopping app on
Android phones in India in terms of monthly active users, according to App Annie.
The company has roped in Bollywood actor Ranveer Singh and Miss World Manushi
Chillar for its TV commercials, its first globally.
“These Chinese ecommerce apps have invested on ads
through social media to target customers, and since many of their products are
cheap, under Rs 1,000, a customer is likely to place an order without the risk
of losing too much money,” Prasad said.
Alibaba’s UC Browser has crossed 130 million monthly
active users in India, catering mainly to non-metro consumers. Its users in India
constitute 30% of its 430 million monthly active users globally.
Damon Xi, general manager for India and Indonesia,
UCWeb, said UC Browser focuses on non-metro users and UC News on users in metro
cities.
“We provided data compression technology to make
browsing and downloading faster for the users. For instance, there were regions
in India where internet connectivity was still improving. In such regions, UC
Browser’s data compression technology becomes a great help,” he said.
For several lending startups from China, India seemed
a green pasture after business dried up at home following a crackdown by
Chinese authorities on pay-day lending. ET reported earlier this year how
several lending startups such as WeCash and FinUp were setting up operations in
India.
WeCash’s Asia-Pacific head, James Chan, told ET in a
previous interaction that the companywith its deep understanding of the lending
business based on the “missing middle, new-to-credit, subprime borrowers in
China”— saw significant market opportunity in India.
“India and China are similar, and with data and
mobile penetration in the country, it is natural to attract Chinese
entrepreneurs,” said K Ganesh, partner at entrepreneurship platform
GrowthStory.
However, challenges abound for these Chinese
companies in India, especially in traversing the gamut of languages while also
dealing with a regulatory shadow over data security concerns. NewsDog’s Chen
said many Chinese entrepreneurs realise the difficulties in entering the India
market.
“There is no wave,” the Chinese investor quoted
earlier said. “Only those Chinese companies who have a lot of money can come to
India for business.”
The proposals of the draft ecommerce policy and the
draft data protection bill, if implemented, could also prove troublesome for
these Chinese entrepreneurs chasing markets in India.
“(Data) localisation will have a definite impact on
Chinese firms,” said Sunil Abraham, head of the Centre for Internet and Society
think-tank. The data localization rule requires internet companies, fintech
companies in particular, to store all their data only within India.
Sandy Shen, research director at technology
researcher Gartner, said India’s data localisation rule could increase the cost
of doing business, as services providers would “need to have multiple hosting
relations and take additional steps to consolidate data.”
Chinese app makers have had to face tougher hurdles
in India.
Last year, the Indian Ministry of Defence ordered the
Armed Forces to uninstall 42 Chinese apps that it had classified as spyware.
Among these apps were UC Browser, UC News, NewsDog, Shareit, Weibo, WeChat, and
NewsDog.
Smartphone Xiaomi, with which NewsDog has partnered
for sharing content, asked the company to prove that its data was not being
shared outside India. “Xiaomi were worried about our name on the list. We
proved to them that all our data (from India) is (stored) only in Mumbai,” Chen
told ET.
Also, late last year, Google temporarily removed UC
Browser from its app store after the app came under the Indian government’s
radar for reportedly sending data to its servers in China.
Mugdha.Variyar@timesgroup.com
No comments:
Post a Comment