Chinese market offers huge opportunities for Scottish startups
Updated: 2016-02-23 21:38
By Cecily Liu in Barcelona, Spain(chinadaily.com.cn)
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China's large technology consumer market and rapid industry growth is creating tremendous opportunities for Scottish technology startups, which often invest heavily into the research and development of new cutting edge technologies and require large scale deployment to recoup costs.
China's market provides scale, but the increasingly sophisticated Chinese consumers' needs for technology products and the innovation levels of Chinese technology partners also act as impetus for Scottish firms to accelerate their technology advancement, they say.
"China is the obvious destination for any technology company to go to, because if you have one percent market share in China, it's more business than if you secure 50 to 70 percent business in the UK," said Harald Burchardt, chief operation officer of PureLifi, at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona.
PureLifi, which sells so-called lifi technology products, currently has sales on a small scale in western markets, but is keenly eyeing partnerships with Chinese telecommunications giants such as Huawei for mass market deployment of technology.
Lifi technology uses light to transmit information at very high speeds, much like the function of wireless wifi, but its small scale deployment means costs are currently higher than wifi. PureLifi is a technology spin-out from the University of Edinburgh.
"If our technology can be integrated into the networks of big Chinese telecom infrastructure providers like Huawei, then it can be commercialized on large scales. We currently manufacture in the UK, but we would be keen to consider shifting manufacturing to China if we find the right partners," Burchardt said.
Scotland has historically enjoyed a high concentration of technology startups due to government support for the sector and universities' research expertise for technology. Leading global technology firms like IBM and Hewlett-Packard have been in Scotland since the 1950s, and today 45,000 people are employed by electronics and electronics-related firms, accounting for 12 percept of manufacturing output.
This vibrant technology scene produced innovative firms like Sensewhere, a startup founded in 2009 in Edinburgh focusing on accurate positioning technology, which is deployed for the first time in China after Chinese internet company Tencent made an investment in it last year.
Tencent already integrated Sensewhere's positioning technology to its Tencent Maps and Tencent QQ applications, and the same will be integrated into WeChat in the coming months.
With Sensewhere's positioning technology, users inside large buildings are able to access more accurate information on their exact location, so they can better navigate to a particular shop or restaurant, or find their family and friends.
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