APUS wants to get closer to its users and enhance its mobile experience

Jun Liu, Vice President, Marketing - APUS Group explains to VARINDIA how from being virtually an unknown entity and being a Chinese tech unicorn, APUS has been able to garner one billion installs in just three years and has expanded globally with the help of its internet go-global strategy - 

APUS is the abbreviation for ‘A Perfect User System’, and it is focused on development of user systems. In 2014 APUS came from China, when the country already had a very fierce mobile technology market which in turn helped the company to go global. It shifted its focus to South America, Middle East, Africa, and even South Asia when APUS discovered that they are huge emerging markets. 

“These regions had two features,” explains Jun Liu, Vice President, Marketing - APUS Group. “First is that users here had started moving from the feature phone to smartphones. And second they had a great telecommunication infrastructure.”

He further goes on to explain, “Once we buy a smart phone, the first application we want to download are applications that can enable you to get best access to the internet like a mobile launcher. In July 2014, we launched our first app which is called APUS launcher and in just one month we saw 10 Million downloads from global users’. Our APUS system is a gateway to help users get access to the internet through launcher, browser, application store, data, news, messages so on so forth. 

We want to build up a platform for our partners and improve the user experience for each of them. We are therefore looking for need content based and service-based partners.”

APUS has accumulated 1.4 Billion users globally, especially in South Asia, which constitutes 22% of its total global market. It has about 120 Million users in India. 

APUS has a lot of hardware partners like Huawei, Xiaomi, ZTE and Lenovo. All these hardware manufacturers have a go global strategy as well and together with them APUS has explored many markets per say. 

“There is always a challenge in going global, as one needs to prepare for two things - one is language and in terms of user friendly, we need to speak the same language as the user. Right now, we have 25 international languages globally. And in India we have supported 3 major languages - English, Hindi and Urdu. Secondly, as a developer, when our system is used in smartphones, we need to make a solid adaptation to any type of hardware, not including the most advanced and premier one,” says Liu. 

He continues, “We are a unicorn company, i.e., in 2015 our market valuation exceeded $1 Billion US, as per the Wall Street Journal. APUS started to explore this market in 2015 and we have experienced a tremendous growth in the mobile industry in India. Indians have questions and are curious on how to achieve or how to better their experiences. So, that way we have a lot of kind of feedback from the local users.”

Globally APUS has 450 employees and majority i.e. 400 is in Beijing. It has various branches in America, European cities like Poland, India and Singapore. In India it also has a local R&D team, local operation team and local art & design team because the user interface needs a lot of localization. Right now the India operation has 30 employees and its office is in Gurgaon.