Southeast Asia is becoming China

At Tech in Asia, we are obsessed with app store rankings, particularly those focusing on Southeast Asia. In the past year, we began spotting a pattern: they’re increasingly dominated by apps that are made in China.

We’ve been at the forefront of covering this trend. Livestreaming app Bigo burst onto the scene in late 2016 and became notorious for salacious content before being cleaned up. The company is essentially a subsidiary of YY, a publicly listed firm that runs China’s largest video-streaming app by revenue.

Well-funded and benefiting from YY’s expertise, Bigo is outshining local competitors like BeLive and M17 – which experienced a botched IPO.

A year later, another Chinese app began gaining ground. TikTok, a karaoke app that allows users to take videos of themselves belting to tunes, took off in Southeast Asia. Bytedance, the company behind TikTok, is also the creator of Toutiao, the immensely popular news aggregator in China.

Dominating the rankings

The trend appears to be accelerating.

Recently, we covered Hago, a social gaming app that’s gaining popularity in Indonesia and Vietnam. It’s an oddity: think of it as a mini-WeChat where strangers become friends by chatting and playing games together.

And guess who’s behind it? Neotask, a company owned by YY.

Even more recently, we spotted Tantan, a dating app created by a Chinese startup of the same name. It’s a top 10 social app on Android in Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, and Nepal. Its rise is a bit more puzzling – the features don’t appear too different from Tinder.

It’s not just a case of companies making it big in China before venturing abroad. Chinese nationals are exporting Chinese ideas to the region.

Take Akulaku as an example. Set up in 2016, the service – which lets users without a credit card buy items online and pay by installment – took off in Indonesia and the Philippines that same year.

Started by Chinese citizen Lin Weibo, Akulaku has raised about US$290 million so far from Sequoia, Shunwei Capital, IDG Capital, and other prominent Chinese and international investors.

Timing, timing, timing

Not all doom and gloom