Although many savvy business people know that China's 1 billion plus population - the world's largest - are not all potential customers for their products and services, few know the explosive rate at which Internet usage and shopping is growing in the Asian country.
With Internet penetration rate now surpassing 10% of the Chinese population, the pace of growth is likely to accelerate based on Internet adoption rates in other countries. After passing the 10% mark, "traffic growth tends to be exponential rather than linear," says Richard Ji, a Morgan Stanley analyst in Hong Kong. "It's leap and jump."
According to Shanghai's China Market Research Group, some 176 million Chinese use the Internet. The majority of this group are males between 18 to 28 years old. Known as China's "little emperors" - they present the most lucrative target for advertisers.
This burgeoning online audience can translate into rapid growth for both fresh startups and mature businesses - if they put the necessary resources into localization. Often times this upfront localization cost is a fraction of what people imagine, particularly if they focus on intelligent marketing to online consumers rather than physical stores or offices.
While larger firms have launched a wave of multimedia ad campaigns to reach the estimated 250 million consumers in China's emerging middle class, smaller firms can still compete at the moment due to the lower entry costs and the fewer number of competitors.
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