How India can use the China-experience - William Bao Bean

William Bao Bean

Startups from India can profit from previous experiences in China, says startup guru William Bao Bean, managing director of the Shanghai-based Chinaccelator to Livemint. “I’m not saying China is the same as India, but the challenges people face in Tier-2+ cities in China were similar to those that people outside Indian metros face. So the approaches that worked in China are more likely to work in India than the approaches that worked in the US," he says.

Livemint:

William Bao Bean has been hands-on with the expansion as a general partner at SOSV and MD of Chinaccelerator and MOX (Mobile Only Accelerator)since 2014. One of his new focus areas is India, where SOSV stepped up activity last year. Six of the 10 startups in the eighth MOX batch demonstrating their innovations in Taipei on 25 February are Indian.
Cheaper smartphones, lower cost of mobile data, and an expanding digital payments infrastructure are a trinity of factors sweetening the India story for Bao Bean. It also explains why he’s more interested in the Tier-2+ or Bharat demographic than the “top 30 million" well-off urban Indians. A monthly income of around ₹20,000 and growing use of Android phones in everyday life creates new possibilities.
“This little thing that they carry around in their pockets, which is maybe among the three most valuable assets they own, has the potential to really change their lives," he says. “It’s like we’ve seen this movie before, right? We’ve seen how the internet and accessibility changed China."
He was a partner at SoftBank China and India before SOSV, and an equity research analyst as VP of Deutsche Bank earlier. “I started covering China in 2004, when the total value of Chinese internet companies was $3 billion and now it’s $2.5 trillion. So we have a huge amount of experience."
This was SOSV’s value proposition when it started investing across Asia in 2010. Initially, it was consumer internet in general, but then MOX focused on mobile internet. “We focus on people whose first experience or the only experience with the internet is on a smartphone. This sort of mobile revolution had a much bigger impact in China than it did in the US or Europe," he says.
Comparisons with an earlier stage in China can be fraught with mismatches because the economy and per capita income grew so fast across the border. India is far from reaching that sort of accelerated growth. Lower capacity to pay, poor infrastructure and a patchy internet have kept VCs focused mostly on urban consumers in India. But Bao Bean can see the parallels between India and China more clearly than most.
“I’m not saying China is the same as India, but the challenges people face in Tier-2+ cities in China were similar to those that people outside Indian metros face. So the approaches that worked in China are more likely to work in India than the approaches that worked in the US."

More at Livemint.

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The self-driving car: the next disruptive tool - Mark Schaub

Mark Schaub

No tool has changed life in China more than the smartphone, with 640 million users and counting in less than a decade. But a new device is possibly disrupting - and improving - life even more, writes Shanghai-based lawyer Mark Schaub in the China Law Insight: the self-driving car. He paints the upcoming changes, and the way China's government is promoting that change.

Mark Schaub:  

There is probably no nation which loves smartphones more dearly than China – all 640 million of them.  In China smartphones are used to pay bills, make bank transfers, buy a coffee, hail a taxi, organize a train ticket, order food delivery, hire a house cleaner, hire a chef, messaging, browse the internet and in some rare cases they are even used to call people. 

If you look in any public place in China almost everyone has a device in hand and eyes intently glued to the screen. You see it when couples are on dates. Even when driving mopeds. 

The really amazing thing about smartphones is not that they are widespread (they are great) but how quickly this happened. The first Apple iPhone was launched in only 2007.  At the time of launch there were many disbelievers: Steve Ballmer of Microsoft said “No chance of any significant market share”, the Nokia CEO said “It doesn’t change our thinking”. The smartphone shows that consumers can quickly adopt new technology. 

Adoption of autonomous vehicles will result in massive disruptions to market, rewriting of regulations, new challenges for infrastructure and new services will be adapted to this new “device”. These changes will only accelerate further adoption until these new “ride-able” devices will also become integral to our daily lives. 

The opportunities (and risks) of autonomous cars for automobile manufacturers and their suppliers are readily apparent. However, there is also a tremendous opportunity for service providers in developing services for autonomous vehicles. Between them the two largest Application (APP) platforms in the world, Google Play and Apple, have over 5 million APPs available (although there is a degree of overlap between Android and Apple versions of the same APPs)[1]. 

Many of these APPs would be applicable to driverless cars and many new ones with novel functions will spring up. Traditional APPs such as looking up the weather or watching a streaming movie will also be applicable to driverless cars, but new more specific functions will be required such as more detailed mapping, parking and traffic information as well as tracking fuel and various other automobile consumables and location of service providers to refill such consumables. Ultimately, a driverless car is pointless if it still needs a driver to perform these functions. Accordingly, fully integrating driverless cars into the Internet of Things (“IoT”) revolution will allow for interoperability between your car and the relevant service providers. These cars will need to fill up, park and go in for maintenance without human guidance. Freeing up drivers from these tasks will pose a challenge for the widespread adoption of driverless cars but also provides opportunities for service providers.

More in the China Law Insight.

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Apple leaves troublesome past behind - Shaun Rein

+Shaun Rein 

For a long time, Apple did not get it right in China. Business analyst Shaun Rein notes that now the American giant is doing things right and ships more smartphones to China, even more than Xiaomi. From Mercury News.

Mercury News:

One gusher of growth the company has yet to fully tap is the Chinese market. The company raked in $16.1 billion in revenue there during the quarter, up 70 percent year over year. For the first time, Apple shipped more smartphones in China than any other manufacturer during the fourth quarter of last year, according to research firm Canalys. But Apple still has ample room to grow in the country, with smartphone market share of about 12 percent, according to Counterpoint Research. 

Shaun Rein, managing director of China Market Research Group, said Apple has come a long way in China, where it previously had struggled to compete without larger phones. "Now with iPhone 6 Plus, they have become the must-have item," he said. "It's really quite remarkable how much people are adopting it." 

Apple CFO Luca Maestri said the company is on track to have 40 stores in greater China by mid-2016. 

But Apple will need to step up the pace of store openings to make the most of the opportunity and give as much attention to the Chinese market as it gives to the U.S., Rein said. 

"Apple is succeeding in spite of itself in China because they have bad distribution," he said. "It's bigger, and people are willing to pay more." 

Analysts will also be closely watching the sales for other Apple products such as the Apple Watch, the company's first brand-new product since the iPad.

More in Mercury News.

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What are the new trends for China in 2015? Here are our seven trends.  

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