China Internet Report 2018 (abacusnews.com) 78
At Rise Conference in Hong Kong on Tuesday, Abacus executive producer Ravi Hiranand, South China Morning Post technology editor Chua Kong Ho, and 500 Startups partner Edith Yeung presented China Internet Report 2018, highlighting the big names and wider trends shaping China's technology. The takeaway: China has nearly 3 times the number of internet users as the United States, and the gap will only widen: China has 772 million internet users, vastly more than the 292 million in the US. And there's still plenty of room to grow -- internet penetration is only at 55% in China, while in the US, it's 89%.
Beijing is China's unicorn capital: Some of China's biggest tech giants may have started in Shenzhen, but Beijing leads the way with 31 tech unicorns. (Shenzhen has just 11!)
China's internet giants are doing everything: From streaming video to self-driving cars, the big three (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) are present in almost every tech sector, either by investing in startups or by building it themselves.
Government policy continue to actively shape China's tech industry.
China's online shopping giants are going offline.
China loves short videos.
WeChat's mini-programs are cementing its place as China's virtual mobile operating system: Mini-programs, which are no bigger than 10 megabytes and running in the WeChat app are gaining ground -- WeChat now hosts 1 million mini-apps, and the number of people who use them daily is expected to reach 400 million.
China lags behind the US in AI, but the government wants to catch up -- soon.
China is making smart speakers but Chinese users aren't buying them: There are now over 100 smart speaker developers in the country (including all of the tech giants), but demand isn't there yet -- in 2017, only 350,000 smart speakers were sold in China, compared to 25 million in the US.
China is now the world's biggest gaming market: It accounts for more than aquarter of the world's total gaming revenue (the US is close behind in second). And it's dominated by two players: Tencent and NetEase, who jointly have over 60% market share in China.
Beijing is China's unicorn capital: Some of China's biggest tech giants may have started in Shenzhen, but Beijing leads the way with 31 tech unicorns. (Shenzhen has just 11!)
China's internet giants are doing everything: From streaming video to self-driving cars, the big three (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) are present in almost every tech sector, either by investing in startups or by building it themselves.
Government policy continue to actively shape China's tech industry.
China's online shopping giants are going offline.
China loves short videos.
WeChat's mini-programs are cementing its place as China's virtual mobile operating system: Mini-programs, which are no bigger than 10 megabytes and running in the WeChat app are gaining ground -- WeChat now hosts 1 million mini-apps, and the number of people who use them daily is expected to reach 400 million.
China lags behind the US in AI, but the government wants to catch up -- soon.
China is making smart speakers but Chinese users aren't buying them: There are now over 100 smart speaker developers in the country (including all of the tech giants), but demand isn't there yet -- in 2017, only 350,000 smart speakers were sold in China, compared to 25 million in the US.
China is now the world's biggest gaming market: It accounts for more than aquarter of the world's total gaming revenue (the US is close behind in second). And it's dominated by two players: Tencent and NetEase, who jointly have over 60% market share in China.
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Will the united states be relevant if china stopped giving it cheap production and waste disposal?
Re:who cares about China (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you know how much cheaper china is than the US at this point?
Its marginal.
First because labor costs are decreasing in relevance as we automate.
Second because chinese labor costs have gone up.
Third because various things in china other than labor are more expensive than in the US.
Fourth because there are often unaccounted costs to doing business in china such as forced tech transfers, IP theft, etc that ultimately can erase all gains.
There is more... but that makes the point that it is more complicated and the cost of doing business in china is not that much cheaper than in the US.
And because I won't be believed and no one uses a search engine to inform themselves absent it getting jammed in their faces:
http://fortune.com/2015/06/26/... [fortune.com]
China is replaceable in the US supply chain. We only used them because we are making a lot of things in other countries in east asia and china was a reasonable place to assemble things. Totally replaceable.
I know I know... lots of either clueless or politically motivated asshats running around running their mouths saying X or Y must be and the status quo is forever.
Think for yourselves.
Note the UK is also cheaper than Germany. Add that to your thinking on the Brexit discussions. ;)
UK is to Germany as China is to US? (Score:2)
Note the UK is also cheaper than Germany. Add that to your thinking on the Brexit discussions.
The UK may become Germany's China?
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You can green eggs and ham that if that is your pleasure... I can certainly empathize with north by north west thinking. ;)
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If it's so easy to replace them, why doesn't the united states do it?
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How many recommended FDA servings are there in an elephant? When a man goes to Costco etc and buys a one gallon jar of mayonnaise... how does he propose to use it all?
One serving at a time.
It took us over ten years to get here... how long will it take us to get out? If we work at it, another ten years.
The man asks why are we not doing it? The man does not know that we ARE doing it. What the man means is "why haven't we ALREADY done it?"... Time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
You might as well ask from the
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India.
India is where new manufacturing will take place.
Africa would be, but the inherent low skilled population combined unstable / corrupt governance makes it too risky as an investment.
Africa will probably be more stable and have better education by the time India reaches the state that China is now. It's interesting how the mantel always gets passed on... At one point America was a cheap place for Europeans to get goods from. Then Japan became a cheap place for Americans to get goods from. Now the world gets its goods from China. No doubt, India and Indonesia are the next countries to take that role- and Africa won't be far behind them.
Give it 200 years and everyone will be importing
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Africa will probably be more stable and have better education by the time India reaches the state that China is now.
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that to occur...
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I have high hopes for the development and modernity of the Indian people, however I think the larger changes are being ignored here...
The need for cheap labor in far away places to do menial tasks relies on that cheap labor being economically efficient.
Look at the combine harvester and what that did to slave cotton picking economics?
Machines can make literal slave labor uneconomical.
So, what work would you put the Indians to that the machines aren't coming for like a shot already?
Entire economic paradigms a
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it also renders one of china's primary contributions irrelevant... the other one is a willingness to pollute their country.
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Smart microphones (Score:3)
China is making smart speakers but Chinese users aren't buying them: There are now over 100 smart speaker developers in the country (including all of the tech giants), but demand isn't there yet -- in 2017, only 350,000 smart speakers were sold in China, compared to 25 million in the US.
Maybe the Chinese term is Listens-all-the-time? We-hear-all-you-say? Or smart microphones? That is what we should start calling them, they will sell a lot less in North America too.
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It's quite well known that Asians are smarter. No surprise they didn't fall for it like Americans clearly have.
Re: Smart microphones (Score:5, Informative)
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I do
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Sure, mate, it was free, just like Facebook.
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Maybe it's that time of the month.
Chinese don't buy smart speakers (Score:5, Interesting)
That makes sense. If you live in a country where you have known that everyone and their dog is eavesdropping on you 24/7, you are wary of such trojan horses.
Only in countries where the population isn't used to a government that makes it their business to spy on you the people could possibly be gullible enough to buy such crap.
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Maybe because smartphones were not the topic of this report?
If I have to list all the things that upset me about governmental spying on us every time I complain about one aspect, I guess I should start preparing a copy/paste statement or I'll have carpal tunnel before the day is over.
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If I have to list all the things that upset me about governmental spying on us every time I complain about one aspect, I guess I should start preparing a copy/paste statement or I'll have carpal tunnel before the day is over.
And if you made a jerking-off motion every time someone left some moronic response to a comment on Slashdot, you'd have it even sooner :)
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No, just less used to the consequences. The Chinese (and in former times, people living in Soviet states) had a pretty good idea what's happening to them if they say something the government doesn't like. The US government acts in a more refined way. First, whatever you're not supposed to say is being made "bad", this is hyped with one of the biggest propaganda machines since the fall of the Third Reich, and as soon as you have support of the population you can make it illegal, or at the very least cow peop
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Only in countries where the population isn't used to a government that makes it their business to spy on you the people could possibly be gullible enough to buy such crap.
Arguably, Americans are more used to their government spying on them. They're so used to it, they don't even notice.
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Because guns are really effective against attack helicopters, fighter jets and missiles!
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USA citizens cannot have AK-47's... can they?
The short answer is "not really", which is unconstitutional right on its face. There are some already in the country, and if you spend scads of money then you can have one. (Also unconstitutional — NY's ban on saturday night specials was shot down as being unfair to the poor.) Otherwise, no.
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Karate is from Japan. (or at least the place it is from is part of modern Japan)
world's biggest gaming market (Score:2)
WeChat & miniprograms vs web & PWAs (Score:3)
> WeChat's mini-programs are cementing its place as China's virtual mobile operating system: Mini-programs, which are no bigger than 10 megabytes and running in the WeChat app are gaining ground -- WeChat now hosts 1 million mini-apps, and the number of people who use them daily is expected to reach 400 million.
The penetration of WeChat is quite worrying when considering the future of internet/web (in China, at least), but also these mini-programs seem to be a direct threat to PWAs (as well as native apps). Any entity that wants to get value from the internet in China needs to master these technologies. I see Tesla have already realised this:
"Tesla has a mini-program enabling users to locate charging stations, schedule a test-drive and share their experiences about driving a Tesla car"
https://walkthechat.com/wechat... [walkthechat.com]
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Part of the popularity of WeChat mini-programs is likely due to the fact that you can develop a single program and have it work on anything that WeChat works on, whether it be iPhone, Android, or some other platform. Since pretty much every smart phone in China has WeChat installed, this allows developers to reach all smart phone users without having to develop iPhone and Android specific apps.
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Yes, that is surely true.
There also a similar issue with having to use multiple 'app stores' to gain access to the user-base, and the varying rules they enforce.
Perhaps it'll be a 'good thing' since it'll tend to move people away from app stores, particularly Apple's but also the multitude of Android ones (Google's is irrelevant, of course, but there are other Android ones), but it's a little worrying that it moves to a single platform independent one controlled by a single company. I can't see TenCent givi
Need to learn Mandarin, not English (Score:2)
It used to be that to write software, your really needed decent English. How could anyone write a line of code without Stack Overflow?
But it occurs to me that to write a WeChat miniprogram you need to read Mandarin. And well.
The educated Chinese already read English but we do not read Mandarin.
(Indians all speak English for tech work anyway among themselves -- there is often no other common language. The Russians are not so important.)
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interesting...do you have any references? I had a quick look for dev guides, but I didn't come up with anything.
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This is like how I studied Latin for 5 years, and as a result I can now work out what year buildings were put up.
More like you studied Latin for 5 minutes and spent the rest of the time giving yourself hand shandies.
Forget Alexa - we're screwed, deservedly so (Score:1)
How can you all be so stupid? Listening "speakers" are so not the issue.
Chinese companies with direct access to the largest market behind the moat of language and xenophobia will have 3-5 times the resources of any western company.
Plus, they're already buying or stealing the best of our technology -- x86 courtesy AMD, jets courtesy Boeing, etc. - i.e., courtesy our business and technical leaders who are selling out for their own advancement.
We will have no control over our economy or our lives. We will be
The Soviet Union had (Score:2)
"mini" (Score:2)
Mini-programs, which are no bigger than 10 megabytes
*Angrily boots up Tandy 1000*
*Me, an embedded engineer*: Tng n zhège xio péngkè!
Unicorn capital (Score:2)
Beijing is the unicorn capital of the world?
Moving the wife to Beijing with me to pick up some of the hot Asian ladies interested in being unicorns.
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What do you mean? Twilight Sparkle or Rarity?
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A unicorn is a woman who wants to be in a relationship with an established man/wife couple. ... so yes, Twilight Sparkle. She's kinky like that.
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A unicorn is a woman who wants to be in a relationship with an established man/wife couple.
Since when?
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A unicorn is a woman who wants to be in a relationship with an established man/wife couple.
Since when?
I don't know when, but the term has been around at least a couple of decades.
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This also just in (Score:2)
Countries with large populations have larger people. More news at 11:30.
wrong terminology (Score:1)
china does not have "772 million internet users". they have 772 million intranet users who happen to be able to access some internet sites that the government allows.