About the level of penetration of mobile devices in China, the largest markets in China and the reasons why it is necessary to work with them directly, App2Top.ru Sergey Korneev, marketing manager of Clickky, told us.
Sergey Korneev2013 was in many ways a landmark year for the mobile industry.
Google Play is ahead of the App Store in terms of the number of downloaded apps. The United States unexpectedly lost the palm to Japan in terms of revenue from mobile markets. Moreover, neither the USA nor European countries were in the top three in terms of the growth rate of the mobile application market. The list of leaders now looks like this: Japan, South Korea and China. In fact, there was a change of long-established leaders – Asian markets followed the consolidated Western markets. The Chinese market is special among them.
On the one hand, it is huge: the Chinese have the largest number of mobile devices in the world. At the moment, 900 million mobile phones have been sold there, of which 440 million are smartphones. On the other hand, China is still partly a closed market for third-party application developers.
What do we know about Chinese users? If we talk about the division by mobile platforms, Android is in the lead here with a significant advantage. Samsung has the largest market share (21%) among these devices – in 2013 the company sold 19 million gadgets. Lenovo is in second place with 13%. According to the results of 2013, Apple covers only 5% of the mobile device market in China. That is, more than 90% of smartphones and tablets sold in China in 2013 run on Google’s operating system.
That is why the Android application market in this country is considered one of the most promising in the world. As for the platform for the sale of mobile applications for Android OS, things are not the same here as in other countries.
The fact is that the closure of Google Play has created a niche of alternative mobile markets. And where there is a demand, there will be a supply. The role of the official platform for the sale of applications written for the Android platform is now performed by hundreds of markets, but 90% of mobile traffic in China is generated by the twenty largest, among which three giants stand out: Quihoo, Tencent and Baidu.
Qihoo (or rather, Qihoo360) is a software development corporation, the creators of popular antivirus software in China, a browser and even their own search engine. They also created one of the largest Android application markets, which allows you to install programs on your device while sitting at your computer. Qihoo’s audience is more than 400 million Chinese Internet users.
Tencent is an even larger media corporation, the owners of the largest Internet portal in China. A huge amount of advertising passes through their resources, including advertising of mobile applications.
Baidu is another search engine (130 million users daily), the leading web company in China, which also manages Android programs. As a result of a $1.9 billion deal, Baidu took over the 91 Wireless store last summer. However, even before the purchase, the company had its own app store.
It is very difficult for developers to go directly to the above-mentioned Chinese markets, as well as two dozen similar ones. The specifics of doing business in China play a role here. “Go in from the street” in this situation simply will not work. All acquaintances and negotiations prefer to conduct face-to-face, thanks to personal connections and patronage.
Of course, you can use the services of advertising networks. But there are a number of reasons why it is worth looking for access directly to direct channels.
Firstly, advertising networks in China do not have enough traffic. For example, the same Qihoo boasts 460 million active users. No advertising network in China will be able to offer anything like this.
Secondly, only large channels provide guarantees of copyright preservation upon termination of the agreement between the developer and the market. Under the threat of lawsuits, the markets are forced to clean all small platforms from pirated copies of applications.
To be continued…