Just back from my first trip to China in 2006 (my fourth in past 12 mos). 30+ meetings in 8 days. It was a whirlwind.
More details coming, but here are some general takeaways:
* The Internet market in China is globally significant and will only get more important going forward.
* Over 110 million users (gov't announced 111 million last week, and others have estimated 130 million right now).
* Because of the immaturity of the ecommerce market, not-so-attractive demographics of Internet users (most are young and poor), lack of standards for things like ad tech and pricing/packaging of online ads, the online ad market is way behind where you would think it should be. That is changing quickly but may be an impediment to the market taking off in 2006 and/or 2007.
The bottomline is that many developments in China are impressive. The traffic volume of popular sites is already huge. The overhead of building these businesses is very low. And new entrepreneurial developments are cranking up everywhere. Just wait until the paid search market kicks in. The big question is...when does the China Internet become #1 in the world? In my opinion it will (can't miss). This may take 7-10 yrs. But it could come sooner. I think 3-5 yrs out, it may surprise a lot of people.
Non-China companies cannot ignore this market. Now is the time to start setting up shop there. It will be a meaningful revenue and profit stream for just about any successful Internet company within 3 to 5 years. And China will likely be every Internet company's (those that enter now) largest market within 10 yrs (if not sooner).
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