India's first-time internet users are addicted to these quirky Chinese apps

Hundreds of millions of Indians, newly connected to the web, are flocking to wacky, racy content on apps such as Like, Helo and TikTok.

Business Standard : Some of China’s quirkiest social-media firms are signing up hundreds of millions of consumers in India, tech’s biggest untapped market, looking to capture users who aren’t already locked into Facebook, Twitter or other American apps.

Chinese content-sharing apps such as Bigo Inc.’s Like and Bigo Live, along with Bytedance Ltd.’s Helo and TikTok, are taking off in this country of 1.3 billion, where most people are getting online for the first time using low-cost smartphones and dirt-cheap data plans. These apps, with ad-supported models, feature hours and hours of mostly wacky and often titillating content: brief videos of slapstick gags, girls blowing kisses, patriotic songs, teens twerking to the latest Bollywood hits and more.

Their simple interfaces appeal to users such as Asha Limbu, a 31-year-old from the northeastern state of Manipur who works as a housekeeper in New Delhi. In between doing housework for a middle class family, Ms. Limbu spends three hours a day on Like, scrolling through hundreds of tiny videos in a sitting and connecting with friends and strangers along the way.

“Facebook is boring,” she said. She has heard of Twitter and Instagram but never tried them.

Apps for the Next Billion

Chinese social media apps are exploding in India, where hundreds of millions of people are getting online for the first time.

Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service, with more than 200 million users, is hugely popular across many socioeconomic classes and language speakers in India; it doesn’t carry ads. YouTube, from Alphabet Inc.’s Google, remains popular as users binge on videos. Still, some of the new Chinese apps are growing more quickly and could soon chip away at Facebook and Alphabet’s domination of ad dollars in the country.

Chinese companies are expanding overseas as they face slowing growth and increased censorship at home. Chinese social-media apps were downloaded more than 950 million times in India last year, three times as many as in 2017, according to mobile-data firm Sensor Tower.

But while Chinese giants Tencent Holdings Ltd, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Weibo Corp. have yet to find a foothold in India, apps such as Like are popular. Like’s owner, Bigo, was founded in 2016 by David Xueling Li, chairman of Chinese live-streaming company YY.com. The app and its sister platform, video-streaming app Bigo Live, have 69 million monthly users globally; it doesn’t disclose how many users it has in India. Bigo in February said it would invest $100 million to expand its business in India and hire 1,000 people.