Can Software Companies Make Money in China?

[A Former User]

There are now more than a dozen listed Chinese software companies with a valuation of over US$1 billion. And these are not valuations based on vaporware (software announced publicly and promoted even though it does not yet exist) –these companies make significant profits.

More Here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-software-companies-make-money-china-gordon-orr

[scottalanmiller]

They don't really say WHY they pay. I suspect it is either that they are paying for support or paying because the products are SaaS. My guess is that software is not making the money, support or hosting is. Things that you can't steal.

[tonyshowoff]

Yes, but finding someone who can correctly read/write technical Chinese (good to have both simplified and traditional, the latter for those suckers off the mainland ) and also speak technical English with the same proficiency is not that easy. In fact we used to have a programmer who spoke Cantonese, he grew up in Hong Kong, and yet he was fairly bad at translating our software. Further, keep in mind because of transliteration systems like pinyin, younger people are becoming handicapped to the needlessly complex Chinese writing system (even so-called simplified).

This may be why companies tend not to do Chinese right away, and what ends up happening is a local Chinese company ends up cloning it (Facebook, Google, etc) and so the original which is more popular in the west, ends up losing out. So, we try to put as much as we can in something other than English, Spanish, French, and Japanese, which seem to essentially rule the multilanguage software universe. As in we start with Eastern European languages, because the same thing which happens in China, also happens in places like Russia.

Also internationally you have to price things with the non-western country in mind. For example we may charge $5 per user in the US, but in Turkey we end up charging only about $1.10 per user (if billing address is in Turkey, not just because they use Turkish). Our system of calculation is just based on the differences of income.