Unfriended abroad, China's tech giants seek home comfort

Beijing

CHINA'S tech titans can rely on their massive home market to ride out a Donald Trump-led campaign against them overseas, and in the long-term their global prospects remain strong, analysts say.

Tech firms from China have stormed to success in the global market with everything from video-sharing apps and mobile games to smartphones and sophisticated telecom infrastructure.

But the US, Australia, UK and India are among the huge markets where they have taken a hit because of espionage concerns or diplomatic feuds, tethering their international ambitions. "Technology is increasingly becoming a geopolitical issue" and "a strategic priority" for a growing number of countries, Dexter Thillien, an analyst at Fitch Solutions, said.

However, Chinese firms have a massive market at home to focus on even if they are unable to pursue international goals - some 900 million users are up for grabs, more than the United States and Europe combined.

While the Chinese Internet is tightly controlled with the "Great Firewall", the ecosystem provides companies the opportunity to roll out China-specific apps for potentially huge customer bases.

TikTok, for example, is one of the most popular Chinese-made apps in the world but is not available in the country. Instead, its parent ByteDance offers a similar app called Douyin, which Bloomberg said surpassed 600 million daily active users in August and yielded US$6.1 billion in revenue over a 12-month period.

Mr Trump has also targeted Huawei with sanctions and asked allies to shun the firm's 5G equipment, alleging it could be used as a spying tool by the Chinese government.

Separate tensions between New Delhi and Beijing have also led to a ban on TikTok and other Chinese apps in India, a massive market with hundreds of millions of potential customers. Huawei, TikTok and the Chinese government have all denied the allegations.

But while Chinese app makers and tech firms have complained about being unfairly targeted, they remain huge players on the global tech scene.

Despite the security allegations, TikTok was the most downloaded app in the world outside of video games last month, according to SensorTower, a research firm.

Huawei remains one of the biggest makers of smartphones in the world, and is one of the top manufacturers of sophisticated 5G equipment needed to build next-generation high-speed communication networks.

And like ByteDance and Huawei, other tech giants in China are eyeing growth areas within the world's second-largest economy, including autonomous vehicles, quantum computing and biotechnology. ByteDance competitor Tencent, meanwhile, has been looking to create a game streaming service similar to the Amazon-owned Twitch, with potentially 300 million users in China, Bloomberg reported last month. AFP