Even in its earliest days HiPiHi was moving for an international strategy. Apparently, even with (I believe) a Chinese-only interface, the virtual world is already seeing international adoption.
"HiPiHi from the beginning was meant to be a global platform. It differs from 2-D, and 15% of our customers come from overseas," Founder and CEO Hui Xu told CNReviews. "Even though they don’t speak Chinese, they can still have fun and meet people inside our virtual world. When they speak English, they are usually understood by the non-English speakers as well. Our basic concept model was to make our model international even though our main focus is building around the Chinese population. From the start, we handled everything with the intention of going global within our companies from our company structure, the board, staff recruitment, are all focused on. We have contacts in Japan, Singapore, USA; we may have offices abroad in a few years and produce international teams in different countries to spread out product worldwide."
Seems interesting that they are also looking for international expansion, when they have such a big opportunity in their home market in China given the online population and spending growth there?
Ex Hipihi business development manager Bjorn Lee mentioned that the China open virtual worlds were looking at ways to pick up growth, which has been less than initially expected http://vrfashion.blogspot.com/2008/07/china-virtual-worlds-interview-with.html
Posted by: Simon Newstead | July 31, 2008 at 08:48 PM