Why Chinese Apps Are the Favorites of Young Americans, Wall Street Journal, Mar. 26, 2023.
It isn’t just the algorithms, but lessons from a competitive culture
By Shen LuFollow, Karen HaoFollow and Raffaele Huang
Four of the five hottest apps in the US in March were forged in China. Algorithms are often cited as their secret sauce. An often overlooked facet is how cutthroat competition for users at home has given Chinese firms a leg up over Western rivals. Much like during China’s rise to manufacturing dominance a few decades ago, Chinese tech companies have harnessed a labor pool of affordable talent to constantly fine-tune product features. One illustration of how immersed American consumers are in an app ecosystem created by Chinese companies: Under the hashtags #temuhaul or #sheinhaul, Gen-Z shoppers have taken to display the result of their shopping sprees in TikTok videos with captions such as “$50 worth of very RANDOM items on TEMU.”Chinese internet companies’ organizational efficiency is overlooked by their American competitors, say investors, engineers and analysts. The Chinese firms spend lavishly to push their apps in the US. They leverage China’s one billion internet users to test user preferences and optimize their AI models at home, then export the tech overseas.
(To be continued)