Rosy long term growth of Chinese domain market

China is a great domain market for those who like to study data and try to draw a big picture of where the country will be heading. There are reports constantly published to help you understand the internet in general and domain name in particular.

The latest one I just finished reading is 互联网发展趋势报告2017 (translation: Internet Trend Report 2017) released only a month ago by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), a think tank for the Chinese government in the area of innovation and development of industry.

Reading the report from the domain name perspective, I came away feeling very encouraged about the future of this market, and my confidence is supported by the following two points.

1. Growing internet economy

Year	GDP Share
2005	14.2%
2008	15.2%
2011	20.3%
2014	26.1%
2015	27.5%

This table shows the share of the internet economy as percentage of China’s GDP. Obviously, the internet economy has been growing significantly, and the growth will continue because of favorable fundamentals such as large population, savvy internet users, supportive government, booming startups and incubators, and aggressive VC funding. The larger the internet economy becomes, the more Chinese companies will get online, which translates to continued demand for domain names.

2. China is No. 2 on Top 20 Global Internet Companies list (market cap)

Rank	Company	Country
1	Apple	USA
2	Alphabet	USA
3	Amazon	USA
4	Facebook	USA
5	Tencent	China
6	Alibaba	China
7	Priceline	USA
8	Uber	USA
9	Baidu	China
10	Ant Financial	China
11	Salesforce.com	USA
12	Xiaomi	China
13	Paypal	USA
14	Netflix	USA
15	Yahoo!	USA
16	Jing Dong	China
17	eBay	USA
18	Airbnb	USA
19	Yahoo!Japan	Japan
20	Didi Chuxing	China

USA is the biggest (13), followed by China (6). It is clear there are only two major players in the internet arena. Considering the fundaments I mentioned in point 1, I speculate that more Chinese companies will get on to this list. This means premium .com domain names will continue to sell well in China because the largest Chinese companies all want to have the best (most expensive) domain names for their corporate websites. Also, China will remain a very important domain market for domain investors.

Therefore, I’m working hard to develop a strong network of executives from Chinese companies. I read everyday, and then pick the most interesting pieces to put into my daily educational series and share with Chinese executives on LinkedIn. I believe “give and it’ll be given to you.”

Note: You can download the Chinese report from: http://www.catr.cn/kxyj/qwfb/bps/201701/P020170110333987961362.pdf

This first appeared on Coreile.com