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Comment by adityakothadiya | Hacker News Reader

Wow! China is a huge market. I know it was very big, but didn't know it's this huge. I wonder if China has equally good Startup ecosystem like USA which promotes innovation and entrepreneurship. Also, another question is - do US startups even have a strategy to focus equally on Chinese market like US market? If yes, how do they go about doing that?

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Don't be fooled, if you consider income or even worse spending China is still a tiny market. 20 years from now it might be far more important, but for now it only has a voracious appetite for a small number of imports such as Oil and industrial secrets.

Well, that just means it's a great time to get into that market. If had already become huge and spending was huge, there would be lots of startups focusing on china.

Perfect time to start laying out some groundwork.

I've seen thai school teachers spend $10s of dollars on facebook games. In thai school teacher wages, that is something like like 3% to 10% of their monthly wage, which is significant. Don't underestimate a market like china. Protection from psychological traps like bad spending and keeping up with the jonses tend to be less there too unfortunately/fortunately.

It's somewhat like ignoring the teenager market.

I think it's important to consider population, so maybe measure Internet penetration as a percentage of the population.

For example:

Internet Users in US: 230,630,000 Population of US: 307,006,550 people

That's roughly 75% of the US population.

Internet Users in China: 298,000,000 people Population of China: 1,324,655,000

That's roughly 22.5% of the Chinese population.

However, by looking at the graph, we can also see that the growth of the Internet population is growing (exponentially) at a much faster rate in China than it ever did in the US.

Bingo. Isn't the magic number for hitting near 100% penetration of a household technology around 30%? Once you hit that point, then it will go to nearly 100% within a few years because things just snowball and it is no longer a fringe/geek thing, but something that is common and expected.

I think we all remember when the US had far below 22.5%

You've got a great point there but let me add something. The question if percentages or absolute numbers are valuable depends on the goal of your investigation. When you want to determine the technological advancement of a country going for the relative numbers should be the way to go. However when you want to determine if a country should be a target market for your startup/company absolute numbers are fine. Even though only 22,5% of the Chinese people use the internet 298,000,000 users is still a huge market. Definitely to consider targeting.

Hi niekmass,

You are absolutely correct. The goal of your investigation does in fact dictate if you should use percentages or absolute numbers. Likewise, 298 million Chinese Internet users is nothing to sneeze at!

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