UCWeb announced today that its UC Browser just hit 400 million user base worldwide, signaling the company’s even firmer grip on mobile browser market after it became the world’s largest mobile browsering app by user base last year.
The popularity among mobile users gave much impetus to the Beijing-based company as it has been busy setting feet aboard with fruitful results. For instance, UCWeb now boasts more than 25% market share in India, making the country UCWeb’s largest market outside China. It also ventured into U.S. with local branch being set up couple month back.
UCWeb is currently looking to beef up its crew in U.S. office. “We’re considering recruiting more local taletns”, the company’s International PR director told me last time in an interview.
The browser vendor also picked up pace of developments in its home turf. In China its domestic market it has achieved more than 50% market share. On the other hand, QQBrowser by Tencent is also catching up to the game by leveraging its huge QQ user pool.
In an aim to further cement its position in India market – currently Opera is the No.1 in India in mobile browser market — UCWeb joins hands with the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) for the first AppFest on December 13-15, 2012 in Hyderabad. Kenny Ye, the company’s Inda managing Director said that UCWeb is committed to Indian market and would like to grow together with local mobile developers. “We hope that by partnering with local developers here in India and leveraging our global R&D resources, we can bring localized products and a better user experience to our Indian users as well as serve our 400 million global users”, said Ye.
He also spoke at the conference on how UCWeb has built a strong ecosystem by embracing open standards, redefining the browser as a service platform, and enabling more than 5,000 partners worldwide to tap its huge user base in making the ecosystem more vibrant.
In emerging markets such as India, mobile internet has propelled the functionality of a mobile phone to the next level. With more than 950 million mobile phone users, India’s mobile internet users exceed PC internet users by at least three fold. The data traffic for mobile internet surpassed that of PC internet in May 2012, and it accounts for approximately 60 percent of the total traffic in November 2012. UCWeb has been committed to the Indian market and has been focusing on the localization of its products to meet the needs of Indian consumers. UCWeb launched a Hindi version of UC Browser in September and will soon release its Urdu version for better localization experience.