Kingsoft Eyes Taiwan's Application Software Market

Taipei, March 3, 2006 (CENS)--After introducing popular online games, mainland China-based Kingsoft Corp. plans to find an agent in Taiwan and debut other application and software products here.

Kingsoft president Lei Jun claimed that his company's Kingsoft Antivirus and Word Processing System (WPS) application software are very competitive because they are freeware products and charge users only service fees.

Established in 1988, Kingsoft is a leading online game and application software developer and distributor in mainland China. Kingsoft offers a portfolio of online games, information security software (including anti-virus, anti-spy and firewall software), utility products (dictionary, translation, and other consumer software), and office application software (word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software), all of which were developed the company's in-house R&D teams.

Lei Claimed that Taiwan has the strong possibility of becoming a good market for Kingsoft' s products due to the shared language and culture on the both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Due to legal limitations (mainland China-based companies are banned from setting up 100%-owned subsidiaries in Taiwan), Lei explained, Kingsoft will look for a local agent for its application-software products.

The president pointed out that the integration between software and the Internet is a growing trend, and most software products are expected to be offered free of charge or sold online in the future. Kingsoft is actively transforming its business model in this direction, Lei said, and the company's overseas market strategy is not to actual boxed software in retail outlets but to sell it online. "The basic software should be free, but additional services will be available for a fee, " Lei said.

Kingsoft has pushed its antivirus software products in Japan and experienced a surprising sales performance, attracting the attention of major international antivirus players such as Trend Micro and Symantec. Kingsoft's antivirus software can be downloaded free-of-charge from the Internet, and users have to pay only when they want to upgrade functions or update the virus descriptions, which allows users to detect new viruses. Users are allowed to update the descriptions up to three times per day, and can decide whether to pay only 980 Japanese yen (NT$272, US$8.43) for the service after a one-year trial period.

In Taiwan, Lei said, Kingsoft plans to adopt the same "free software, additional services for a fee" operations mode. Wang Jun-po, chairman of Soft-World International Corp., the local agent for Kingsoft's online game software, said that his company is intensively evaluating the feasibility of serving as the agent for Kingsoft's application software products in Taiwan.