China’s Internet giants: Going global or focusing on China?
The recent traffic ranking of major Internet websites have some names we are not familiar with. Baidu, the most well-known Chinese search engine has the 5th largest traffic in the Internet. QQ.com, the portal website operated by Tencent, has the 10th largest traffic. Other Chinese websites including Taobao.com (16th), Sina.com.ca (17th) and Weibo.com (29th) are in the top 30.
According to the following YouTube video, Tencent has the market capitalization of $35 billion, which makes it the 3rd largest Internet company in the world. Baidu has the market capitalization of $24 billion. Tencent provides on-line chatting services to Chinese Internet Users, and it has more than 500 million accounts.
Despite of their spectacular successes in the domestic Chinese market, none of those companies have significant presence outside of China. Taobao’s recent partnership with Softbank Japan is to stimulate China – Japan eCommerce transactions, but online transactions between two countries remain stagnant.
When I visited QQ.com and Taobao, I could not find English version of the website. Perhaps the domestic Chinese market is too lucrative for those companies and there is no need for foreign expansion. China currently has about 500 million Internet users, which makes this country to have the largest number of Internet users in the world.
Yet, if any of Chinese Internet giants wants to expand outside of China, they need to differentiate themselves from well-established websites such as Google and Facebook. In other words, China’s websites need to offer something new and innovative to be successful outside of the country. That day might not come for a while, but there is a high potential for success because of the huge home market in China.
For more information, visit:
http://mostpopularwebsites.net/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvDVgtekW2A&feature=related
http://www.qq.com/ (Tencent)
March 28th, 2012 at 10:33 pm
I just recently came back from exchange to Shanghai and all the websites you mentioned are extremely popular there. QQ.com is like a combination of Facebook and MSN Messenger. People from all ages play games and chat on QQ.com. Baidu is the Google of China. TaoBao is the eBay of China. People buy off TaoBao all the time and the quality of the products are usually good as advertised.
I agree that these websites do not have English interfaces, which really makes it hard for people who don’t understand Chinese to use. However, I get the feeling that they are not really looking to expand internationally.
March 28th, 2012 at 10:40 pm
Thank you for your insights.
I totally agree that Chinese Internet providers are currently not interested in international expansion. I am hoping to have more access to Chinese websites such as Taobao for shopping, but currently there is no chance. I think Taobao’s provides a high quality shopping experience, but I’m not sure if they are planning to expand it to outside of China.