National mar­kets beg to dif­fer: it’s not only about lan­guages, but about the sub­tle cul­tural dif­fer­ences which make the dif­fer­ence between top and drop. That goes espe­cially for Asian mar­kets. And there is another spe­cialty about the largest Asian mar­ket: Chi­nese gov­ern­ment strictly con­trols all inter­net access. This kind of cen­sor­ship not only influ­ences the polit­i­cal but also the eco­nomic sphere. Juer­gen Hoe­barth, who knows the Chi­nese online mar­ket like the back of his hand, wrote a white paper about Chi­nese start-ups which is def­i­nitely worth a look (espe­cially since it’s a free download!).

In Don’t for­get China, Juer­gen talks a lot about the copy­cat sit­u­a­tion — when it comes to net busi­ness, in many cases the copy­cat does a lot bet­ter in China than the orig­i­nal competitor:

As we can see in China there is def­i­nitely a copy­cat of every suc­cess story form the west and they are doing very well. This last case con­cern­ing the video por­tal sec­tor in the Chi­nese mar­ket is really inter­est­ing, because it is a bat­tle where an inter­na­tional site like YouTube has more or less no chance to win. Bureau­cratic restric­tions by the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment just kick them out of the mar­ket. Once there is a copy­cat brand for a ser­vice that is bet­ter known, it is hard for the orig­i­nal to get into the mar­ket again, even when the restric­tions are removed and an agree­ment is reached between Google, who owns YouTube and the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment. The rea­son, for cen­sor­ship at the moment, is that there have been regime crit­i­cal videos between the mil­lions that are offered on YouTube.

The Chi­nese gov­ern­ment announced that in 2010, broad­band net access will be avail­able in every sin­gle vil­lage. If you’re found­ing an inter­na­tion­ally ori­ented start-up today, you can­not afford to over­look China, argues Juergen:

As we live in a global world we are in a global com­pe­ti­tion as well, and so I would say the fast, smart and clever one will win the race and those who are think­ing from the begin­ning on about a global strat­egy when they found a com­pany will sur­vive and if they are well pre­pared and know the rules of the Chi­nese inter­net mar­ket and adapt some issues, they def­i­nitely will have a chance to sur­vive in this coun­try as well and will not get kicked out as eas­ily as the big global net giants have been before by their Chi­nese copycats.

eBay had to learn this les­son the hard way: after their total fail­ure they com­pletely aban­doned the Chi­nese mar­ket. appar­ently, the com­pany had over­looked two major prob­lems: credit cards are not too wide­spread in China plus the direct con­tact between buyer and seller (via mes­sag­ing ser­vices) is a vital trust-factor.

So if in the future you do not only want to reach Mary, John and Jack but also Bao, Fang and Wei, take a look at Juergen’s whitepa­per: Direct Down­load: Don’t for­get China