Alibaba’s mobile business unit, UCWeb, is banking on its content recommendation strategy for a bigger chunk of the Indian market. It is also pushing the group’s e-commerce and digital entertainment business in India. The company has recently invested Rs 200 crore to scale up its content business in India.
UCWeb claims to have acquired more than a hundred million monthly active users (MAU) in India. According to StatCounter (an invisible Web tracker) UCWeb already has a 43.3 per cent market share in the Indian mobile browser segment. Jack Huang, President of Overseas Business, Alibaba Mobile Business Group, told BW Businessworld that India was the most critical overseas market for UCWeb.
He expects the company’s investment in India to push mobile Internet to an era of ‘GUF’ (Google, UCWeb, and Facebook). “From a business point of view, the UCWeb browser search engine is still lying at the essence of the entire Google’s ecosystem and they have been cultivating the rest of their products based on the search engine ecosystem,” said Huang. The company will target content consumption through UC News, which was an area that Google and Facebook “to some extent are not fiercely targeting”.
UCWeb is one of the biggest Web browsers in China, with a market share exceeding 60 per cent. Alibaba took over UCWeb in 2014, paying a whopping $3.4 billion for it. Huang said the company would focus on user-generated content by self-publishers, to fill the gap between supply and demand for content in India. By upgrading the UC browser and with the launch of UC News, UCWeb aims to be the foremost content distribution platform in India.
“A huge part of our investment in the India market will go into encouraging more publishers to create content for Indian users,” said Huang. “In 2017 alone, we plan to add more than 30,000 self-publishers, bloggers and key opinion leaders to our platform, generating over 10,000 articles for UC News, every single day,” said Huang. UC News is available in three languages, Hindi, Indonesian and English.
(The author visited China at the invitation of UCWeb)
