Month: July 2014

ChinaIT: Deepin Linux

2014, July 22

If you are one of those who are looking for alternatives to MS Windows for personal or professional use, there is one cool Linux distribution that many Linux experts have been talking about recently. It is Chinese Deepin 2014.

Deepin 2014 was issued in July this year, and at the moment, it’s been rated as 13th on the popularity scale among about 300 commercially active distributions worldwide. Chinese company based in Wuhan has done a great job in adapting Ubuntu 14.04 and developing themselves some cool stuff, which makes the whole OS very stable, attractive and easy to use. I have installed it myself and here below is my review.

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ChinaIT: Inspur (浪潮)

2014, July 11

Here is my marketing analysis of the currently fifth biggest server manufacturer in the world, Chinese company Inspur (浪潮). The company had achieved record fourfold increase in server shipments from 20’000 units in 1Q2013 to 80’000 units in 1Q2014. It currently holds 3.4% of the world server market, in front of Japanese Fujitsu. (see Gartner’s report)

Inspur is gaining traction following the recent disputes between Chinese and US governments on the communication backdoors and unauthorized accesses. In the aftermath, Chinese ministry of finance persuaded several banks to participate in the trial use of domestic servers. Following the successful tests at China Construction Bank, other companies have started massively unmounting and scrapping equipment of American IT manufacturers and replacing it with Inspur infrastructure.

So, who is this company based in Jinan, and is their current marketing strategy I2I (IBM to Inspur) sustainable ?

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ChinaIT: Tencent (腾讯)

2014, July 4

Have you heard of Tencent (腾讯), 4th largest internet company in the world (bigger than Facebook) ? It is known for QQ instant messaging, but the flagship product in 2014 has been WeChat (微信), the most powerful social-mobile app in China with 400 million users.

WeChat allows users to chat, speak, leave voice messages and other things like WhatsUp. But it is used also as a shopping channel and payment platform.

Consider this use case: Use the app service DidiDache to book the taxi. Then while riding on the cab, use other cool features to book the restaurant and order food, shop online or discuss with friends. At the end of the ride, use the same app linked to your bank card to pay the taxi. Clean, cashless, sophisticated, and powerful.

No wonder the revenue of Tencent grew 36% YoY, and only in the 1st quarter 2014 it was $3B. The value of WeChat alone is estimated to $30B.

Will keep you posted on some other cool ChinaIT companies soon.

Sasha

ChinaIT Series – Market and Opportunity Analyses

I’m discovering a real gem – Chinese IT market with a lot of busines potential, for collaboration, partnership, outsoucing, export and import, and business development.

Chinesse IT market is currently 2nd largest in the world, and is growing fast. In the contry there are 2 million registered web sites, 5 millions IT professionals. Yearly IT spending is $200B and is growing $30B per year. What is also important, China is moving the ship towards higher value adding activities and innovation, so I believe there is quite a lot to learn from this new IT power.

Maybe selling their products in the West currently looks overwhelming and risky for these businesses, but I believe it’s just the matter of time when we’ll have them more present in Europe and Switzerland, as it is already the case with Japanese corporations like Fujitsu, Hitachi and NTT.

I’m opening a new series of blog posts that I will call ChinaIT, and in which I will do deeper business analysis of some big established players, but also small innovative startups from different technology domains.

Sasha Lazarevic, 2014