Alibaba’s UC News Wants To Join The Big Boys’ League In India

When UCWeb, part of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba group, says it wants to be spoken of in the same breath as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc., you know it means business.

And it’s not entirely unbelievable. UCWeb, which comes under Alibaba’s Mobile Business Group, is a leading mobile internet software and service provider. Its UC Browser is among the world’s top mobile browsers.

According to StatCounter, a web traffic analysis tool, the browser now has a 57 percent market share in India, making it the largest mobile browser in the country, even ahead of Chrome, Opera and Safari.

The company’s statistics from China, Indonesia or Russia tell a similar story. The Alibaba group company claims that UC Browser tops the download charts in each of these key emerging economies.

Perhaps that’s what prompted the company to announce an investment of Rs 200 crore in India and Indonesia over the next couple of years. It said that the funds will primarily be used to tap the massive potential of user-generated content in India via its content and news distribution platform, UC News.

There are more than 600 million mobile users and 20 million online content creators in China, whereas India currently has 371 million mobile users with miniscule contribution from self-publishing, outlining a huge demand-supply gap, Huang told BloombergQuint in an interview.

“As such, our flagship product UC Browser has also transformed itself from being the number one mobile browser in India (according to StatCounter) to a leading content distribution platform in India by integrating with news feeds from UC News. India is the most critical overseas market for UCWeb and this investment will help bring in the global mobile internet to an era of ‘GUF’ (Google, UCWeb, and Facebook),” he added.

Although UC Browser has been a hugely successful venture for the company, it doesn’t want to be seen as just a browsing tool. It has now adopted a content distribution platform strategy.

Such a strategy gains significance considering the issues relating to foreign investment rules in India. App-based taxi service provider Uber Technologies Inc. and e-commerce major Amazon Inc., who are entirely driven by technology, have had to answer several questions in India relating to their business models.

When asked whether UCWeb sees itself as a content creator, distributor or an internet company, Huang explained, “We define ourselves as a content distribution company. Second, we still like to define ourselves in an old school way as an internet technology company. But one thing we'd like to highlight is that there is no conflict between these two. In fact, the two are perfectly connected because the internet technology can help in content distribution, creation and consumption more efficiently. We are both an internet technology company as well as a content distribution platform.”

Is UCWeb Going The Snapchat Way?

UCWeb launched its news aggregator UC News in India last year. And while the company can use its news service to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google for online traffic, the platform is just a part of a much bigger plan. The company, like Snapchat, wants to focus on short videos and believes that the Indian market is ideal for its open platform, We-Media.

We-Media is an open platform where ordinary users and bloggers can become publishers and post content, without worrying about hosting costs or its monetisation. That’s taken care of by the platform and self-publishers are compensated based on a monetary plan that the company announced in January.

The company also estimates that more and more digital content consumers will turn themselves into “prosumers”—consumers who also contribute to the content production, which will lead to an increase in digital content creators in India', Ye added.

A concept like We-Media seems perfect for a country like China, where media repression and censorship is commonplace. It’s a different story in India—the media enjoys constitutional freedoms and is largely self regulated. But Huang and his team believe there’s a lot of scope for such a platform in India too, as long as it’s tweaked to suit the Indian palette.

“We are not asking media professionals to leave their current platform or job in India. We are asking you to release more energy on a new platform. We enable your ability to make money, earn fame and everything that you care about. So, what we are doing is trying to make this cake bigger. That is our goal,” Huang said.

The company aims to make the UC We-Media program the top platform for content consumption, creation and services in India and Indonesia. It plans to add more than 30,000 self-publishers, bloggers and key opinion leaders to its platform in 2017, in turn, generating over 10,000 articles for UC News every single day.

Be it McDonald’s, Uber or Amazon, all these multinational companies have understood how imperative localisation is in a market like India. UCWeb is no exception to the rule. It offers products in Hindi and English and has tied up with celebrities such as author Chetan Bhagat and actor Anushka Sharma for its We-Media program. The company also regularly ties up with Indian entertainment channels and movie makers for exclusive content releases on its platforms.

“Be it in India, China or Indonesia, we think the key factor which will make us win this will be how we understand our users, our localisation and our tie up with local partners in India and our observation of users in terms of what they like, how much they will consume and how they will consume it,” Huang said.

(The writer was at UCWeb's headquarters in Guangzhou, China at the invitation of Alibaba Mobile Business Group)