Tao Li – Founder and Executive Director, APUS

APUS, one of the fastest growing mobile internet companies, has over 1.4 billion global users in more than 200 countries and in over 25 international languages, now aims towards expansion and is exploring opportunities to collaborate with phone manufacturers to recommend their products to users by pre-installation. The China-based company sees India as a huge potential for incremental growth as a large part of population still has no internet access. Tao Li, Founder and Executive Director, APUS, shared his vision with Haider Ali Khan.

Do you think there’s still scope, and audience left for you in India to conquer? In close to five years, APUS accumulated over 1.4 billion users from more than 200 countries and regions, with over 25 supported international languages. It was hailed by the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times as the fastest growing mobile Internet company in the world, growing faster than Google and Facebook. APUS not only demonstrated a huge lead in products, technology and business models, but also made breakthroughs in high technology, such as big data and cloud services, and established its own data centres in Asia, Europe and America.

In this growth journey, India played a vital role, and even today continues to be a strategic market in our growth plans. In 2015, APUS set up a branch in India to integrate more closely with the market. We also set up a local research and development centre to help computer professionals to provide better services to local users through their creativity. As a result of all these efforts, today APUS’ largest customer base comes from India.

In India, a large portion of the population still has no access to the Internet, which is a huge potential for

incremental growth.

Also, we have identified the scope for Indian localisation to build an ecosystem for local users. As per the KPMG Media and Entertainment Report 2018, the industry inched closer to the Rs 1,500billion mark in 2017-18 (FY18). Thanks to a rapidly growing digital user base, the industry clocked a growth of 10.9 per cent in FY18, reaching Rs. 1,436 billion, which had a positive impact on demand across sectors like films, digital advertising, animation and VFX, gaming and music.

In 2018, when providing ecosystem services for users, we felt the need to improve our understanding of politics, culture, religion and economy. With that vision, APUS is not only developing products, technology and business models but also promoting local Internet development by providing advanced technology and capital. We acknowledge that only once this ecosystem has developed, will there be more content and service developers to provide content and services for us.

We are looking to make India our base for Asia and further strengthen our presence as we evaluate more partnership opportunities with Indian firms.

“Our plans include building an ecosystem based on our users and bringing more content to them, including music, video, books and other resources to local users. Besides, we will establish cooperation with local partners in daily services, e-commerce and financial services”

What’s good in China may not be in India. What have you observed of the usage pattern, demand and supply gap and pain points? India and China are similar and yet diverse in many ways. But, sometimes, it is hard for global technology companies to assess the demands of the heterogeneous population in India, considering the diversity in terms of culture and language. Hence, understanding Indian consumers can be tricky as they are continually changing and are very diverse.

Several factors are shaping India’s complex consumption market. They

include consumers’ content consumption patterns and the impact of digital technologies and emerging trends that could alter consumer demands. It is important to understand these trends to meet our users’ expectations.

Ever since we launched in India, we have been working towards collecting and analysing the data of the consumers. We have leveraged disruptive technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, to ensure we provide a personalised user experience to the consumer.

We have learnt that the key recipe to succeed in a market like India is to follow an effective approach of localisation. It includes offering your product in diverse languages so that the product becomes more user-friendly. Our content partnerships with Hotstar, Inmobi and Alibaba have been important in this regard.

What have you learned out of Google in India and your immediate competition UC Browser? APUS, Google and UC browser are working in different fields.

Since the PC - Internet era, Google developed itself as an ad-focused business model, which will continue to be very advantageous when it hits the mobile world. Google will leverage the advantage in every market with vast numbers of the mobile population, including India. On the other hand, Google has also focused on the development of advanced technology all along trying to resume its high-speed growth in the new track driven by the new tech.

We have benefited from the mature business model of programmed ads of Google during our development days. However, we also need to pay attention to the disadvantages of this type of reliance. We have started to experiment with the In-app-purchase model, for which there is new demand from content-driven app users. The newly deployed app like CUTCUT (AI powered photo editor), some online games like Amazing Fish and video-focused apps of APUS are some examples where this model has been successful.

As for UC Browser, another successful app from China, it has followed the same development track as ours—from programmed ads to in-app purchases.

What is your policy on data storage? We may collect our users’ personal data while we are providing services as this data is critical for us to realise various functions of our products. We use the data to help us develop and improve our products to provide better services.

I would like to reiterate and assure the readers/ our users that we use this data in strict compliance with the purposes set forth by policy frameworks. We always inform the users in advance and obtain their consent before we use the data for any other purpose.

What have you done to go the extra mile for localisation? In 2015, we started our efforts with our overseas branch focused on localisation in India. Since then, we have recruited and trained more than 200 local professionals to help us in the app operations and local promotion.

Besides cultivating and nurturing talent, we also established a fund to localise our business via partnerships from investment. The Rs 2 billion fund has helped us identify local partners with

great potential.

Moreover, we have hosted delegates from the Indian mobile industry for the past three years in Beijing. We have shared our experience, provided our in-depth observations from our big database and most of all, and learnt from our friends in India.

What is your current active user base in India? Globally, we have 1.2 billion users out of which 20 per cent is from the Indian market, making it our largest user base.

India is the most vibrant market and the biggest market in terms of population, besides China. What is appealing about India to me and APUS is its demographic dividend. Young Indian minds are always curious about the unknown world and about exploring the world of the Internet. Ours is a new product for a new market that is curious and accepting. That’s why we are optimistic about expanding in India.

Are you working with OEMS in India to integrate APUS into their smartphones? For the past three years, we chose to build visibility for APUS products to users through our efforts and let the users decide whether they would download the apps or not. With this philosophy, we were determined to respect the users’ own choices. We have aimed to provide a smaller, faster and simpler product for users. We want to replace the original Android System with APUS System to improve users’ experience especially in the aspects of power-saving, security protection, etc.

Back in the day, we were seeing fast expansion and exponential growth in our user base. Hence, we took the strategic decision of not undertaking the timeconsuming, complicated process to have the phone manufacturers pre-install our apps. This process would have hindered the rapid pace at which we grew and would not have satisfied our need for fast growth at that time.

However, today, the situation is different.

Today, APUS has over 1.2 billion global users. And as the next step towards expansion, we have been exploring opportunities to collaborate with phone manufacturers to recommend our products to users by pre-installation.

We have had an initial encouraging response primarily because more and more phone manufacturers are becoming aware of the value addition that APUS System brings for the users. APUS System strengthens the function of accessing the Internet. It integrates the browser, news centre, app market, games centre and search engine into one system, providing a one-stop solution for users to access the Internet. As a result, they are also interested in pre-installing APUS System on the original hardware to increase their sales.

Do you have plans to extend your alliance beyond Hotstar and Inmobi in India? The Indian Internet Market is the largest reserved market with enormous scope for development. What’s more, Indian users’ cultural attributes of social entertainment create opportunities for the Indian Internet in the content and entertainment field.

APUS has collaborated with content service providers, such as Inmobi—india’s largest, and the world’s third-largest mobile advertising technology company and Hotstar—the largest online video platform in India—to provide rich content for the users in India.

Our plans include building an ecosystem based on our users and bringing more content to them, including music, video, books and other resources to local users. Besides, we will establish cooperation with local partners in daily services, e-commerce and financial services, etc., and bring the services to our users through the APUS platform.

With our leading products, technologies and capital, we hope to help more local Internet enterprises, accelerate the development of the local Internet industry, and, eventually build local ecosystems. In this way, we can provide local users with better value-added services such as content, daily services and e-commerce.

Why are you limiting yourself to Android only? We aren’t restricting ourselves to Android, but when we launched APUS, we wanted to focus on two things: 1) autonomy to create the software and 2) reaching as many users as possible.

Android helped in both situations. Apple makes iphones and IOS, so it has extremely tight control over how the software and hardware work together. On the other hand, Google offers the Android software to many organisations and is more flexible. Also, Android allows for more customisation than IOS (unless it’s jailbroken!) Android is compatible with a lot more phones as compared to IOS, which is compatible only with Apple.

Hence, for our initial foray into this market, Android seemed to be a more logical choice. Having said that, as we now enjoy a large customer base across the world and are in a better position to consider more options. We have not entirely ruled out the possibility of exploring IOS compatibility. ■