Chinese MS Office challenger targets India

WPS Office by Kingsoft Corp is free for the mobile version, and makes money on the desktop

 Kingsoft Corporation, the Renminbi 3.35-billion (approximately $526-million) leading Chinese software and internet service company which is competing with Microsoft Office suite with its WPS Office, has revealed its India gameplan based on product expansion, roping in partners, and starting a development centre.

Kingsoft Corporation, the Hong Kong exchange-listed holding company, is active in online game business, internet security, office productivity software, and cloud market. Its subsidiaries include WestHouse, Cheetah Mobile, WPS, and Kingsoft Cloud.

Kingsoft Global Sales Vice President Rene Buhay said the company is looking at India as a mobile-crazy market where the vertical is registering tremendous growth. Interacting with Deccan Herald on the sidelines of the GMIC 2015, Buhay said the company has already started its negotiations with a handful of partners. “Once we figure out the partner, we will start to monetise our WPS Office for personal computers,” he said.

WPS Office is an office suite for Microsoft Windows, Linux, iOS and Android OS, developed by the Zhuhai-based software developer Kingsoft. WPS Office is a suite made up of three primary components — WPS Writer, WPS Presentation, and WPS Spreadsheet.

900 mn users globally

“We are rated as the best and cheapest alternative to Microsoft Office suite by leading technology reviewers in the US. It is evident from our global traction with 900 million users,” he said.

Pointing out the glitches of using a pirated version of MS Office, Kingsoft official pointed out the legal version of WPS Office provides hassle-free experience. “Our free WPS Office version for mobile is very user friendly. We also started giving email access to the suite,” he said.

The product has had a long history of development and success in China under the name ‘WPS’ and ‘WPS Office’. Since WPS Office 2005, the user interface is similar to that of Microsoft Office products, and supports Microsoft document formats, besides native Kingsoft formats.

The company already launched the WPS Office 7 for Android and WSP 10 Office for Windows users recently. “Every two years we will launch a new version. WPS 11 will be ready by 2017,” he said.

Commenting that WPS is a productivity app, he said it is little different from others. “When you open a spreadsheet, MS Word document, or PowerPoint, etc. in your mobile, you can only view your content. But WPS Office helps you to open and edit your document without a spreadsheet,” he said.

When asked about the company’s global presence, he said the WPS Office suite has been localised in 46 languages globally. “In India, we are present only in Hindi. We will localise further in regional languages based on the population base,” he said.

Freemium model

On the monetisation part, he said the company will give its mobile version free of cost. “We make revenue on the PC side. We started our operation via Cheetah. Once we find distribution partners we will will expand and monetise in India and it will happen in 2016,” he said.

“India is the second largest mobile market and we would like to be here. Once we reach a certain level of penetration, we will open a development centre to cater to the growing number of clients,” he said. Kingsoft believe in the crawl, walk, and run philosophy in its India strategy and the company targets startups and SMEs (small and medium enterprises). 

Kingsoft Corporation’s revenues in the second quarter of 2015 rose 71 per cent year-on-year to RMB 1,282.24 million. The strong topline increase was mainly due to the revenue contribution from cloud storage and cloud computing services, and the enhanced monetisation capabilities on free user traffic of WPS Office.

The global MAU (monthly active users) of the WPS family reached nearly 169 million in June 2015, with WPS Office mobile MAU at nearly 74 million — a 48 per cent increase year-over-year.