One step further: Chinese short-video apps take the world by storm

You may have heard of the popular short-video app TikTok, or even of Kwai, but what about Likee, Vmate or Hago? These are the players competing at a global level in the trendy short-video sector, and they all share something in common: Chinese roots.

Bytedance’s TikTok (known in China as Douyin) has been downloaded more than 1.5 billion times outside of its domestic market after a two-year global push. It has topped app stores’ most downloaded charts several times in different countries including Japan, the US, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Germany, France, and Russia.

Photo credit: Josef Kubeš / 123RF

Other Chinese competitors in the short-video sector are also quickly expanding to selected overseas markets. Kwai, which is owned by Kuaishou, has repeatedly been the most downloaded app in Brazil. Chinese ecommerce heavyweight Alibaba’s short-video experiment VMate has entrenched its position in the Indian market with 50 million monthly active users (MAUs), while YY Inc’s Likee also has a strong presence in Russia and Southeast Asia.

In their global push, which of these apps has actually a better chance of standing out?

Set to soar

Seeking expansion overseas has become an ongoing trend for Chinese tech firms, because compared with the increasingly saturated home market, abroad markets represent fresh opportunities.

According to the latest stats from data consultancy Analysys, as of November 2019, Bytedance’s flagship Douyin leads the scene, claiming 530 million MAUs, out of a total market of over 878 million users. Kuaishou is the runner-up with 425 million MAUs, while Xigua and Huoshan – both developed by Bytedance – are sharing the third spot with 114 million MAUs each.

However, data also shows that the growth of MAUs in China has been sluggish, in part because of the already enormous base, which peaked at 1.138 billion, or 81% of the nation’s total population, in February. Looking abroad, these companies leading the fierce short-video race in China know that timing matters, and that the early bird catches the worm.

In the global expansion, the pioneer was Musical.ly, a lip-syncing short-video app founded in July 2014 in Shanghai by Alex Zhu (now chief of TikTok), which targeted the North American market and quickly won American teens’ hearts, promptly claiming 100 million users only two years after its debut.

Musical.ly’s rise drew attention from social media juggernaut Facebook, which reportedly held serious talks in 2016 to determine whether to buy the firm, but finally dropped the idea out of “concerns about the app’s young user base and Chinese background,” Fortune reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.

In 2017, TikTok’s parent company Bytedance acquired Musical.ly for nearly US$1 billion and merged the two apps later in 2018, seeking to grow TikTok’s international presence on the shoulder of Musical.ly.

The global move proved to be startling, as TikTok crossed the 1 billion mark for worldwide installs on the App Store and Google Play (the figure excludes Android installs in China) in February 2019. With over 663 million of these installs in 2018, TikTok surpassed Instagram’s 444 million new downloads, according to mobile intelligence company Sensor Tower. The app also experienced a rapid rise in Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia.

YY Inc, another Chinese entertainment and livestreaming company, also began to look overseas in 2016, starting with Southeast Asia and later expanding its footprint to the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and North America. It currently houses livestreaming apps including Bigo Live, Nimo TV, Yome Live, Cube TV, and short-video sharing platform Likee, which enjoys high popularity in Russia.

“During the third quarter of 2019, we enlarged our global user base to 470.1 million on Likee, Imo, Bigo Live, and Hago altogether,” Li Xuelin, chairman and CEO of YY, said of the entertainment platforms owned by YY. Nearly 80% of YY’s users were from markets outside China in Q3.

Navigating success

It’s a bumpy voyage