Jan. 2 (NBD) -- As of December 2017, while Google's Chrome won 55.08 percent of global market share, keeping its dominance in the global browser market, UC Browser, backed by China's e-commerce giant Alibaba, grasped a mere market share of 8.67 percent, behind Apple's Safari browser.

However, it is a different story in two of Asia's fast growing markets, India and Indonesia.

Though more than half of the current mobile and computer users around the world are using Chrome, some experts believe that in the future, there will be one billion new web users in the future and most of them are from India and Indonesia, where users tend to use UC Browser.

Photo/PEXELS

NBD noticed that Google is facing pressure posed by UC Browser in some of Asia's fast growing markets.

In India and Indonesia, Asia's two populous and emerging internet markets, UC Browser is holding much more market shares than those in Google's hand.

According to the statistics from the real-time web analytics StatCounter, UC Browser has grabbed 51 percent of the total market shares in India over the past year, compared with Chrome's 30 percent. In Indonesia, UC Browser led chrome by 41 percent to 32 percent in the same period.

Given the population structure as well as the potential of economic development of the two countries, India and Indonesia are regarded as the last untapped internet markets in the world. 

Besides, South Asia and Southeast Asia have become the fastest growing economies in the world, the two new markets are expected to achieve the rapid growth in the future. 

As of 2021, the annual mobile advertising spending in the Southeast Asia area will rise from 860 million U.S. dollars to 2.2 billion U.S. dollars, with the spending in India increasing from 460 million U.S. dollars to 1.73 billion U.S. dollars, in accordance with the statistics from the research institution eMarketer.

In 2017, Google has set up a research team named Next Billion Users to analyze the product strategies according to the characteristics of emerging markets including India.

The reason why UC Browser is favored by users in some Asian areas lies in its satisfying performance in the countries dominated by low-end smartphones and unstable mobile service.

"It's faster, it takes up less memory, and it looks better than Chrome," siad Rizky Ari Prasetya, a 20-year-old Jakarta resident who recently ditched Chrome for UC Browser.

It is noted that, UC Browser started to provide its service for mobile users in 2004, eight years before Chrome was introduced to Android phones. Ten years later in 2014, Alibaba purchased all stakes of UCWeb and set up the UC mobile business group.

Google, by contrast, released its first PC browser in 2008, but saw a rapid expansion of browser users, the number of which has reached one billion now.

Email: zhanglingxiao@nbd.com.cn