Chinese apps gain billions of overseas users

Several leading Chinese mobile apps have taken the global market by storm, winning over billions of users overseas, reports People's Daily.

A customer uses Alipay at the check-out of a shopping mall in Singapore on December 11, 2016. Alipay is a world-leading mobile payment platform established by China's Internet giant Alibaba. [File Photo: Xinhua]

One of China's domestically-developed Android operating systems, APUS, has more than a billion users worldwide, of which about half come from south and south-east Asia.

Chinese cross-platform file transfer tool SHAREit has also reached over a billion users globally. In Indonesia, more than 80% of the country's netizens use the SHAREit app.

Mobile Internet giant Cheetah Mobile has seen revenue growth double for six consecutive years. Three-quarters of its 600 million users are from outside China, mainly in Europe and America.

And web browser app UC Browser has over 400 million users around the world, and has captured more than half of the market in India.

Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a leading economic newspaper, attributes the ability of Chinese app developers to hone their products in the country's huge mobile Internet market as a key reason for their successes overseas.

China has the world's largest community of mobile Internet users. Official data shows that the country had 753 million mobile Internet users at the end of 2017.

According to Li Tao, founder and CEO of APUS, China's domestic market is relatively mature and highly competitive. At the same time, the rising Internet market in emerging countries provides a remarkable potential for Chinese app developers, which may constitute the major attraction for Chinese enterprises to explore the global market.