Symbian goes to China

[Rafe]

Symbian has announced it has opened an office in Beijing, China. The new office will support Symbian's efforts in the Chinese market including links with academia, developer training and localisation activities. China is already an important market and is likely to be a key battleground between software platforms and device manufacturers in the future.

Read on in the full article.

[krisse]

China is likely to be THE key battleground for all technical standards, along with India. It's still some way off that situation though, a few decades maybe.

[Jules_N93]

A few decades? The sheer number of those markets, plus the year-inyear-out growth of those economies of 8%, makes me believe that this effort is late rather then early =p

[krisse]

My original post did actually say "a decade" but if we're talking about being the largest markets then that's possibly too soon.

Clearly India and China are going to be the two biggest economies very soon, but we shouldn't get too carried away, they still have a long way to go simply on providing the basics. There was a documentary on BBC World recently which claimed India has more starving children than the whole of Africa, for example. China also has a vast problem with poverty in rural areas.

Even if China or India become the biggest economies in the world in the next ten years, they have such vast populations that it will spread the newfound wealth very thinly indeed.

America has 300 million people but China and India each have over 1000 million people. In order for the average Chinese or Indian person to be as rich as the average American, China and India will both have to have economies that are over three times as large as the American one. They not only have to overtake America's economy, they have to overtake it by 200%.

The Indian and Chinese growth rates are extremely promising, their potential market sizes are extremely promising, but put the two together and they cancel each other out to some extent.

Considering the wealth of the country as a whole is one way to put it, but "everyone" in China has a mobile phone. Wether they are rich or living in a shed(litteraly). The cost for using a mobile in china is so cheap even som of the poorest people has them. I've even seen beggars with a mobile phone. This should tell you that there is accutually a much bigger marked then you would expect considering the economical situation of big parts of the population.

This topic made me check for some facts..
By November 2006 there is currently 195.000.000 mobile phones in the US (65 % of the population).
In China the number was 335.000.000 (25%)...
Just to give an idea of how many there might be in a few years with the growth there is here now.

Peace!