Kingsoft Office eyes collaborative strategy in R&D shift

Chinese office software and internet service provider Kingsoft Office will pour one-third of its research and development resources into the collaborative office strategy, which is deemed as the future direction of office software solutions, said Zhang Qingyuan, CEO of Kingsoft Office.

The company has launched five new collaborative office suites, covering forms, remote conferences, calendars, team management tools and document browsing software, in a bid to get a bigger slice in the country's office software market.

WPS Office software, the core product launched by Kingsoft Office, is a leading office productivity suite for PC and mobile devices. It is a high-performing, yet considerably more affordable solution and preferred alternative to Microsoft Office.

Zhang said the number of monthly active users of WPS Office has reached 239 million during the peak of the pandemic, and the number of its users ranked the first on Android, Apple's iOS operating systems, as well as Mac and Linux-based PCs.

Moreover, the number of documents saved on the WPS cloud has surged from 9.3 billion to 82 billion in the past two years, and more than 16 artificial intelligence-powered technologies have been applied into the various components of WPS.

Zhang said their office productivity suites have empowered a batch of tech giants in China, such as Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Huawei, ByteDance and JD, adding the online collaborative office model allows multiple people to edit a document at the same time, and become an effective way for people who work from home.

According to the Qianzhan Industry Research Institute, the market size of China's smart office industry was about 23.4 billion yuan ($3.6 billion) in 2018, up 20.8 percent year-on-year. The figure is expected to reach 48.6 billion yuan in 2024, with a compound annual growth rate of 12.4 percent.