Mobile internet company rings up profit by tapping foreign markets

APUS CEO Li Tao gives interview in Wuzhen, East China's Zhejiang province, Nov 17, 2016. [Photo by Zhu Xingxin/chinadaily.com.cn]

Imbalanced growth in global internet market offers immense opportunities for Chinese companies, said the head of a young Chinese mobile internet company.

Li Tao, CEO of APUS Group, which provides user system including APUS Launcher, APUS Search, and APUS Message Center for mobile phones running on the Android operating system, said the company has accumulated more than 1 billion users worldwide since it was established two years ago.

The company turned profitable in the first quarter of this year, with monthly revenue of about 100 million yuan ($14.5 million), he added.

Li attributed the fast growth to the company's strategy of aiming for the overseas internet market.

"In the global internet landscape, the United States and China boast fastest development and most mature markets, while countries in regions like Southeast Asia, Middle East and Africa lag. This gives us a big opportunity,"Li said.

Now that the company has a large user base, Li wishes to open its platform to more local developers in the next step to provide more interesting and localized contents.

"We had 50 million users in India and more than 30 percent of Indonesian internet users are using our system. We will open our platform to local developers and encourage them to provide video, music, games, and even e-commerce and payment services," he said.

To support future growth, the company has set up a big data platform to analyze user habits and predict what services and products they need in the future.

The company wishes to provide services to some two billion users in the next three years, said Li, adding that he hopes that in every two new mobile phone users, one would use APUS system.