Google China’s Kai-Fu Lee hinted at this on Monday, and a new article would appear to confirm the fact: if Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft want to succeed in China, they’ll need to master the mobile market.
According to Dawn C. Chmielewski, China is the world’s largest mobile phone market, with around 455 million people sending around 33 billion messages per month. The U.S., by contrast, only has a population of around 300 million.
There’s also a difference in how the two nations treat computers; in China, they may be relatively rare, and a product such as Gmail wouldn’t stand a chance. After interviewing a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, Chmielewski was able to report, “E-mail here is treated with the same disdain as the telephone answering machine.”
So, although American companies haven’t even necessarily mastered phone-related matters in their own country, there is a pressing need for them to get up to speed in China. If Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft can’t do it, others may . . . These conditions could even open the doorway for a company like Obvious (Twitter’s creator) to outdo the giants in this one particular market.
