FILE - Passengers look through windows on a bus painted with an advertisement for Google in Beijing, China.
September 10, 2015 10:04 AM
SINGAPORE/BEIJING—Google Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai has made no secret that he wants to get back into China via Google Play, the app store for its Android mobile operating system.
But it's unlikely to be a smooth ride.
Google largely pulled its services out of China five years ago after refusing to continue self-censoring its search results. Since then, it has maintained a limited presence in the world's biggest Internet market, but most of its services, including Play, have been rendered borderline inaccessible.
"Google needs to be in China, period," says Andy Tian, CEO of Asia Innovations, a Chinese app developer and former Google executive. "Once in China, they can expand into other services.
They need a beachhead, and the beachhead is Google Play." Google declined to comment on reports it plans to ramp up its Play store in China this year. Instead, it pointed to comments Pichai has made about exploring how to bring Google Play to China.
But Tian and others say Google has lost basically all ground in most of its major services, especially search and video streaming, to Chinese players such as Internet giants Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba and Qihoo 360. All have built their own products and services to replace or even surpass Google's offerings.
In China and elsewhere in Asia, the centers of gravity in mobile have shifted away from app stores as the point of control to applications like messaging, which act as gateways for third parties to provide services.
Tencent's WeChat, a messaging app originally similar to WhatsApp, has become a digital Swiss army knife, allowing its 600 million monthly active users to play games, book cabs and make payments, among many other things.
Too big to ignore
But China is too big a market for Google to ignore. Apple Inc. complies with local laws and made $13.2 billion last quarter in Greater China, which includes the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan, making it its second-biggest market.
Some in the industry doubt whether Google can use the Play store to help get its other services into China as domestic rivals are now well established and Google would have to comply with Chinese law. That would mean storing all data in China, and meeting information access and censorship requests, a thorny issue, particularly if the U.S. government gets involved.
Others say focusing on Google Play may make things easier.
Chris MacDonald, a business ethics expert at Ryerson University in Toronto who oversaw a case study about Google's operations in China while at Duke University, says Chinese regulators will see Play as less threatening than Search and Gmail, reducing the frequency of government-led probes.
"It's highly unlikely the Chinese government is going to come asking, 'Did anyone download Tetris?'" he said. "If Google doesn't have any highly private information, it can't be asked for highly private information."
