Symbian goes to China
Published by Rafe Blandford at 1:42 UTC, January 17th 2007
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.
China is often seen as a strong market for Linux because of a Chinese preference for home grown or source code accessible projects. However Symbian is currently the market leader and has recently seen strong growth (126% from Q3 2005 to Q3 2006). Opening an office in China is about creating a local presence for support activities but should also be seen as a strategic move to demonstrate commitment to serving the Chinese market.
Nigel Clifford, chief executive officer of Symbian, said “China is a very important market for Symbian with 10 per cent of Symbian smartphones currently shipping in this market and 12.5 per cent of Symbian applications created in China. As most of our customers have bases in China, we hope that the establishment of our new office will support their growth and the development of the Chinese mobile market in general and also fuel local employment and academic opportunities. We are committed to a long-term investment in China”.
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News Discussion
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.
Living in Chna
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.
living in China
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!
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