China's conquest of the Internet

   China is a country very known for it's high population and it's évolution in economy and politics. It is also a special case regarding Internet.
   In fact, in 30 June 2010, China announced having 420 million internet users, and in just a year after the number grew amazingly to reach 485 million users. But what's more interesting is the websites and services used by the chinese internet users.
   We are all used to global or continental services like: Google, Spotify, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter,Skype, Google+, ...etc. But in China, just like Russia, Korea and Japan, many services are country specific. And some are sky high !! I'll introduce some of those services to you:

•    Weibo: A micro-Blogging service similar to Twitter, and even more evolved, now it has nearly 200 million users. Twitter has recently reached 175 million users.

          However there are 2 major differences between Twitter and Weibo:
          Twitter is used worldwide, Weibo is exclusively used in China, the first was launched in 2006, and the second was launched only 2 years ago. In the last 6 months, the users of Weibo increased from 63.1 million to 195 million !!

•  Baidu, the Chinese Google: 

          In addition to Weibo, there is of course the search engine Baidu. It is used by over 70% of the chinese internet users, way ahead of Google and Bing ! Baidu has even paid the luxury of increasing it's market shares in the recent years, and it's aiming for the international with Bing exactly.

• QQ, the Chinese ultimate phenomenon:

          QQ is the Chinese messaging system made in Tencent, used by almost all Chinese internet users. According to the Tencent website, it's users in 31 March 2011 was 674.3 million, making it the second most used service in the internet after Facebook.

• Baidu and Tencent are worth more that Yahoo! and eBay:

          The importance of the group Tencen in the Chinese stock market is valued at 831 billion Yoan, or about 60 billion US dollar. This makes it the third company in the world in Web listing, behind Google (194 billion) and Amazon (98 billion), and way ahead of companies like Yahoo (19 billion) and eBay (44 billion). Baidu is ahead of those two American giants aswell, with a rating of 53 billion dollars.
          The rate of internet users in the Chinese population is only 36%, which gives Tencent, Baidu and Weibo a very important potential of growth only in China! And sooner or later, these companies will have international ambitions, so beware !