Alibaba-owned UCWeb wants to enter Indian film industry and digital content production

China’s UC Browser has been a fairly household name in India’s mobile browser market. Once a key player, UC Browser’s popularity in India has dramatically declined in the past few years, with Google Chrome constantly emerging as the dominant player.

UCBrowser claims to be the world’s leading third-party mobile browser with 1.1 billion global installs while India contributes half of its global installs. However, UCWeb is much more than UC Browser. In fact, in the last few years, the company has expanded its product focus from a mobile browser to a full-fledged content aggregation platform.

So, what is UCWeb up to these days and how it plans to cope with fierce competition in India from not only US players like Google and Apple but also some of the Chinese internet companies like ByteDance, which owns TikTok?

In an interview with Republic World, Huaiyuan Yang, Vice President of UCWeb Global Business, revealed what the company’s plans are for 2020 and how changes in digital content consumption open up new opportunities for the company.

Yang is responsible for all overseas business of UCWeb, including in global markets like India and Indonesia. He also looks after UC Browser’s operations, product development and news feed.

On recognising India’s important as a global market

Yang: India remains one of the most important markets for UC. The Indian market has tremendous growth potential and offers a large user base. The new media content ecosystem (in India) is taking off in a big way now.

On UCWeb’s primary focus in India

Yang: UC aims at creating a responsible content ecosystem that helps narrow the digital divide, create jobs and alleviate poverty in India. We will continue to offer a customised, curated and diverse content experience to our users via our complete product portfolios. For self-generated content creators, we will be able to actively help them grow.

On short-form content and videos

Yang: Short-video content has seen a massive surge on UC Browser with over 3.6 crore short-videos aggregated last year. In 2019, UC launched the WeShare channel on UC Browser. It is an all-in-one platform for localised, entertaining content including short videos, memes, GIFs and more.

On key focus areas for 2020

Yang: Going forward, UC will be able to make its presence felt strongly in the Indian film market, with the production of high-quality content. The collaboration will not only benefit our existing partnerships but will be extended to other filmmakers and production houses to showcase their films to the fullest potential.