Evernote Has 8 million Users in Mainland China, 9% of Its Global User Base

Evernote now has reached 8 million registered users in mainland China and about 20 million installations of its applications, accounting for 9.17% of its global registrations — China is its second largest market outside the U.S., only after Japan It has passed Japan and became the largest market outside the U.S. (source in Chinese).

The number of total registrations is a 100% growth in half a year — In the past May Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, said in China there were 4 million users using either Evernote’s Chinese version or the international one.

Evernote launched Yin Xiang Bi Ji, a separate brand established for China, in May 2012. Now the files uploaded by users of the localized version are stored in servers supported by Cloud Valley, a  Beijing-based company offering Cloud Computing infrastructure. In the same month when the Chinese brand was released, Evernote announced a $70 million investment led by China Broadband Capital, a fund established by the same founder of Cloud Valley, Edward Tian.

Before the launch of the Chinese version, Evernote had been translated into Chinese by volunteers. By November 2011, it had had 600 thousand users in China, about 4% of its total users — back then Korea was the second largest in Asia after Japan, according to Mr. Libin.

After a wave of Evernote clones that emerged in China, Youdao Note turned out to be Evernote’s eventual competitor. Youdao Note, owned by NetEase, announced 15 million registered users four months ago, thanks to its parent company who has hundreds of millions users using its e-mail, news and social networking services to channel.

Youdao once said they’d develop the same features Evernote charged for and offered them to Chinese users for free. For most Chinese users, it’s hard to imagine spending money on such an Internet service — everything else is for free. Evernote released the enterprise version to China earlier this year that charges more than 100 dollars per year. It looks that the company counts on then enterprise version for generating revenue.