Phil Larsen, Chief Marketing Officer of Halfbrick:

Localization Through Cooperation

We have been in the gaming industry for 12 years, and we want to keep our business growing in China, where the market is very promising.

Our base is in Brisbane, Australia, and our business structure is mature. We need to do research and evaluate the potential for growth before opening a branch office somewhere outside Australia. We want to make sure that we know about the market.

We have a lot of partners worldwide, which means we do not have to do it by ourselves. We focus on game development, and our partners could provide a creative vision. We have a publisher here in China. They have a good sensibility for both Chinese and Western markets. Besides translation from English into Chinese, we can also use local social media for better marketing. So far, 30 percent of Fruit Ninja players are Chinese. We can produce unique and exclusive content for Chinese clients through such cooperation.

Re-evaluate the Chinese Market

Our goal is to make the world a little bit smarter, one person at a time. We cannot do it by ourselves or do it overnight. That is why Evernote came to China a year ago. Today, we have 17 people working in Beijing, and we have 4 million users in China out of almost 60 million worldwide. We have many local partners, big and small, that can make our product better.

To realize this ambitious goal, a simple and direct business model eliminates customer and partner conflict. Business is not a zero-sum game. Companies should help each other. We should make a product that is so good that a billion people would love it, and some of them would choose to pay for it.

Being global does not mean what it used to mean. We are here in Beijing not because we only want to sell products here for the Chinese market, but we want to sell products everywhere in the world.

Some of the most dramatic transformations will be in the area of business software, particularly in China. The engine of the country's economic growth in the past 10 years was manufacturing. But now, we see changes from manufacturing to knowledge-based growth. Millions of small- and medium-sized companies realized that their productivity relies on the capability of handling information. It's a brand new field.

China will be the crucible of innovation over the next decade. Frankly speaking, Chinese companies do not have a good reputation for innovation because people in the West believe they just copy things. But they aren't just copying things, they're improving upon them. Copying and improving is a method for innovation anywhere.

Many of the great Chinese companies realized that their products needed to sell worldwide. They are setting a vision that goes far beyond China. That will also work for non-Chinese companies that want to succeed in China.