Road less traveled leads to success for UCWeb chief

By Meng Jing (China Daily) Updated: 2014-08-12 09:07

A UCWeb stand promotes its mobile game distribution platform 9game at an exhibition in Guangzhou. [Photo/China Daily]

Yu Yongfu has his eyes on a billion users, and overseas ventures are vital to realize that goal, Meng Jing reports.

Starting as an entrepreneur, then becoming a successful business owner before becoming an angel investor is a well-trodden career path in the corporate world.

But investor-turned-entrepreneur Yu Yongfu is an exception.

Yu, who quit as vice-president of China's leading venture capital investment firm Legend Capital Management LLC and joined startup mobile browser company UCWeb Inc in 2006, said that being an investor is like sitting in the passenger seat of a car, while being a chief executive officer means you are in the driver's seat.

"Being a passenger is comfy, but without having the fun of a driver who controls the wheel of the car," said the 38-year-old.

Yu, who agreed to sell UCWeb to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd in June in China's largest Internet takeover, is determined to steer his Guangzhou-based company through a global expansion plan, especially after teaming up with the deep-pocketed e-commerce giant.

"Our goal is to rapidly double the number of people using the UC browser to 1 billion. If you look at Internet companies around the world, only Google Inc and Facebook Inc have established user groups that are as large as 1 billion.

"I think UCWeb and Tencent Holdings Ltd's WeChat are the two companies in China that have the potential to grow their user bases to that size," he told China Daily in an interview before Alibaba's takeover.

The goal cannot be reached without expanding to overseas markets, said Yu, who admitted that one of the main reasons he agreed to sell UCWeb to Alibaba is that the extremely profitable e-commerce giant can give his company's globalization plan a strong push.

UCWeb, the second-largest mobile browser in China after Tencent's QQ browser, is known for reducing data usage for those who surf the Internet through mobile devices.

The company saw its market share by active users in China drop 3.2 percentage points quarter-on-quarter to 31.6 percent in the first quarter of 2014, according to Analysys International. But its globalization strategy, launched in 2010, seems to be going well.

The company claims that its mobile browser has a market share of more than 10 percent in 10 countries. The UC Mobile browser even became the leading mobile browser in India earlier this year, accounting for 35 percent of the market.

But Yu wants UCWeb to have 1 billion users in three to five years and 50 percent from countries outside China.

"Being part of the Alibaba Group means that UCWeb is able to invest more in its overseas expansion. Alibaba is a very profitable company, which allows us to focus on long-term development rather than make short-term money," he said, adding that Alibaba's rich experience in tapping into e-commerce markets in other countries can also be valuable to UCWeb.

Yu said that 2014 is the year for UCWeb to gear up its globalization plan with a strong focus on developing countries.

When testing the waters in a new market, UCWeb tends to fly its engineers there and introduce its product to local tech fans. It will set up offices only when the number of users in a particular country reaches 20 million.

It has local offices in India, Indonesia and the United States, and it is expected to set up offices in Russia and Vietnam later this year.

"The Internet is the industry that is most suitable for global expansion. Users usually don't care which country the service provider comes from as long as the product is good," he said.

Unlike the personal computer-based Internet sector, which was pioneered by Western companies (US companies in particular), Yu said that Chinese firms can be leaders instead of followers in the mobile Internet industry.