Qihoo CEO explains why it’s not too late to enter China’s smartphone market

Since its massive US$400 million investment into a smartphone joint venture with Coolpad last year, it has been clear that Qihoo 360 really wants into China’s lucrative smartphone handset market. The few details it has shared about its next foray into that market haven’t looked promising – especially the US$800 price point. But at an industry forum in China yesterday, Qihoo CEO Zhou Hongyi spoke to Sina Tech about why he thinks his new phone will have a chance in China.

Zhou says the phone – which is meant to be coming sometime this year but doesn’t have a specific release date – will be targeted at Chinese students and recent grads. The smartphone market is very crowded, Zhou admitted, but people (especially young people) change phones approximately every year and a half. Given China’s massive population of smartphone users, that means that every year hundreds of millions of people are looking for a new handset again. According to Zhou, the Chinese smartphone market is still very open, and Qihoo isn’t too late to get in on the action.

Of course, Qihoo didn’t want to be entering the smartphone market this late. The company has made several previous attempts at releasing a Qihoo handset by partnering with local hardware companies like Huawei over the past few years, but none of those models ever really caught on. This year’s upcoming release is the company’s strongest effort to date, though, and its massive investment with Coolpad means that if the venture fails it will hurt more than Qihoo’s previous failed efforts in the handset market.

If Zhou is right that it’s not to late for Qihoo, that means there’s still an opening for other companies to get in on China’s smartphone frenzy, too. But with the exception of Xiaomi, new smartphone brands haven’t been able to grab a big chunk of the country’s smartphone market over the past few years. Qihoo has an advantage over other tech firms and local startups in that it is already a household name in China, but that’s no guarantee of success. Lesser-known startups will likely have an even harder time.

(Source: Sina Tech)