The Chinese technology space dwarfs the western market

THE Chinese technology arena is exploding with companies fighting for a market that makes the western market look like chump change.

Lei Jun, Xiaomi's CEO and token Ste...

APPLE, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, eBay. These are the names that come to your mind when you first think about technology. But what about Huawei, Xiaomi, WeChat, Weibo or AliBaba? These companies are all Chinese and they're all playing in a market that makes the western tech market look like chump change.

"Xiaomi and Apple are two completely different companies," says Lei Jun, CEO of Chinese internet company, Xiaomi. He says this, because Jun himself and his company are constantly labelled as China's Steve Jobs and China's Apple, a label that probably isn't unwarranted.

Before starting Xiaomi, Lei Jun would spend his time reading books about Steve Jobs, taking in how he built the company, his marketing techniques and even cultivating Jobs' image by only wearing jeans and dark shirts. Although most media have labelled Jun and Xiaomi as "Apple counterfeits", Jun is just following Jobs' philosophy that "good artists copy, great artists steal", taking what has made Apple successful and infusing his own ideas to now make Xiaomi the 6th largest smartphone maker in China, the world's largest smartphone market, after only releasing its first device in 2011.

Lei Jun, Xiaomi's CEO and token Steve Jobs.

In September last year, Xiaomi unveiled their latest Mi3 smartphone, the fastest phone ever made at the time to a crowd with such excitement that not even Apple's announcement garnered. People cheered at Lei Jun's every word, waving around glowsticks and acting like a bunch of 14-year old girls at a One Direction concert - security even had to make a barrier to stop people from trying to get in after the venue hit capacity. This was all for a smartphone announcement - western technology companies never see this type of loyalty, of fans that live and breathe for their products.

In the first half of 2013, Xiaomi's revenue had already reached $2.15 billion, just 3 years after being in the Chinese market. This growth has even managed to attract one of Google's key Android engineers Hugo Barra to come and work for the Chinese company.

Then there is …

… QZone, a Chinese social networking site that has 603 monthly active users, just in China. JUST IN CHINA! WeChat, the Chinese competitor to WhatsApp currently has 271 million active users in China, short by 130 million compared to WhatsApps 400 million global users. But WeChat has these numbers from, again - JUST CHINA.

The online market place is something else that is on a completely different level. In China, there is an online store called Taobao, a single online store that is twice the size of eBay and Amazon COMBINED.

The Chinese Alibaba group is the worlds largest e-commerce company.

In China, there's a holiday called "Singles Day", where Taobao did more than twice the sales that all US American stores did on Cyber Monday COMBINED. When buying through the site, instead of PayPal, Chinese buyers purchase their products through AliPay, which has nearly 7 times the amount of users than PayPal.

With such massive amounts of money in the digital market, it's no surprise that Apple has launched its efforts even further into the market, launching the iPhone on the worlds largest telco, China Mobile last week, receiving over 1 million pre-orders for the device.

Over the next three years, the Chinese tech sector is expected explode even further, with the online retail expected to be worth $604 billion by 2017.

"The internet represents an advanced way of thinking, companies who are armed with this have an incredible competitive edge" says Lei Jun when describing why he calls his company and Internet Company rather than a smartphone company. It seems fitting, as it seems to be the driving factor behind this monolithic Chinese technology market.