This Famous Google Exec Quit His Job To Work In China — And He's Been Totally Blown Away By What He Found
By Nicholas Carlson
January 11, 2014 8:58 AM
This is Hugo Barra.
YouTube/LeWeb
Barra used to be a top executive in Google's Android division.
Google
In August he quit to go work for the "Steve Jobs of China," Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun.
After just two months in China, Barra spoke at the Le Web tech conference in Paris in December.
YouTube/LeWeb
Barra told his interviewer that he's totally blown away by the place. He said he had some charts to show why…
YouTube/LeWeb
He said the Chinese are incredibly educated with 8 million college grads per year — more than the US.
Hugo Barra
He said Chinese disposable income is growing like crazy. It tripled over the last 8 years.
Hugo Barra
He said China has at least 122 billionaires, second only to the US. 
Hugo Barra
Barra said China has 600 million Internet users - with 50% growth in 3 years.
Hugo Barra
Barra talked about some of the huge recent huge IPOs on the Chinese stock market.
Hugo Barra
Barra talked about how Chinese Internet companies have massive user
numbers. MAU stands for "monthly active users." QZone has 600 million!
Hugo Barra
Then Barra talked some specific Chinese companies. First he mentioned
Alibaba, which owns Taobao, a shopping site he said is twice the size of
eBay and Amazon combined. 
Hugo Barra
Barra said that during a Chinese holiday called "Singles Day" Taobao
did more than twice the sales all US e-commerce companies did on Cyber
Monday. 
Hugo Barra
He talked about JD, which does 3-hour delivery. 
Hugo Barra
JD has an app you can use to see where your delivery guy is. 
Hugo Barra
Alipay is like Paypal in the US, except it's much bigger and more useful. Barra says he uses to pay for his cabs.
Hugo Barra
Weibo is like Twitter, except bigger. Barra only ever had 6,000 Twitter
followers. In two months, he has 200,000 Weibo followers.
Hugo Barra
Barra says he runs his entire social life through an app called WeChat.
He uses it instead of the phone, email, or text messaging. WeChat also
has an Instagram-like feature.
Hugo Barra
The "Uber of China" is an app called Didi. Except with it, you leave a
voice message for the driver telling him where to pick you up and how
much you'll pay.
Hugo Barra
Barra said MoMo is an app you use to talk to strangers who are nearby
you. It's kind of a dating app. It has 100 million users.
Hugo Barra
There's no Google Play store in China (it's banned), so there are a bunch of third-party app stores instead.
Hugo Barra
One is called "91." It's a desktop app like iTunes. Big Chinese search engine Baidu bought it for $1 billion last year. 
Hugo Barra
Barra says he loves China, and is trying to learn to speak the language. Here he is at his favorite dumplings place.
Hugo Barra
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http://finance.yahoo.com/news/famous-google-exec-quit-job-135800020.html
Just remember that China though impressive in Silicon Valley kinds of ways is not a democracy but more a state run Business the way the government is run there. So that businesses are often part of the nation of China in various ways. Also, laws interfere with the success of any foreign business that tries to do business there including copyrights of those businesses taken and used by other Chinese companies.
So, before taking your company to China think about where you are going and the fact that you are American and not Chinese and the fact that business wise you are going to be not only discriminated against as a foreign business but likely interferred with in a variety of ways doing business there as well. Hugo Barra is going in as an exec, he isn't taking an American business there. So, in his case as an employee of a Chinese company he likely will be very impressed and successful financially and in all ways.
However, if you do business there make sure whatever you do is actually to your advantage rather than only really to someone else's advantage instead.
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