Research firm IDC to mine rural consumer data

Executive teams of IDC China and cuncunle.com pose for a group picture on August 10, 2016 during the two company's strategic agreements singing ceremony held in Beijing.[Liu Zheng/chinadaily.com.cn]

US-based research company International Data Corp (IDC) signed strategic agreements with a domestic online-to-offline (O2O) startup on Wednesday, eyeing e-commerce and retail terminal development in the rural market.

"Collaborations in regard to data and consumer activities analysis and rural market research and development, will benefit both sides as IDC reserves global recognized mature analysis system and analyst teams and Cuncunle provides deep understandings on the data base in the county- or village- level," said Wang Jiping, assistant director of IDC China.

Wang said a series of market analysis reports that focused on the Information Communications and Technology (ICT) sector, would be released in the coming year to elaborate the current status and future development potential of China's rural market.

Cuncunle.com is an online-to-offline creative services startup which is keen to support companies in marketing the country's rural area.

"By relying on crowd-sourcing through the internet, it has built webpages for each of China's 640,000 villages and created a mobile application to leverage its 10 million rural users," said Hu Wei, CEO of cuncunle.com.

Last year, the company painted more than 7 million square meters of village walls with advertisements.

The membership users of the company are from a variety of groups including farmers, county- or village- level governors and even rural teachers.

Ru Jianjun, vice president of the company said that the basic data of its users, such as names, genders and occupations, will help companies who are willing to tap the market to generate anatomy of connected consumers.

Ru also pointed out that the ability to collect effective data from the potential market was another advantage of the platform.

"We used to help an US agricultural machinery manufacturer to reach buyers who own at least 300 mu (20 hectares) farmland, and it took only about one week for us to get a name list of 200 people, which sounds irresolvable for the company if only rely on its own ability," Ru said.

Liu Jun, president of cuncunle.com, former vice-president of Lenovo Group Ltd, noted that as the mobile internet and smartphone permeations have witnessed rapid growth in China's countryside, the rural area will become the next blue sea market for business.

"The internet eco-system that built by Cuncunle in rural market will support IDC to reach more lower-level analytical specimen," Liu said.

According to Kitty Fok, director of IDC China, the company has been working to upgrade so as to meet the ongoing transformation and upgrading industries in the nation.

"We've been tried more research approaches to make an effort to implement government's 'Internet Plus' initiative and our partnership with Cuncunle is just a beginning of our research eco-system building program," said Fok. "We'll continue to seek more partnerships in rural market in the future."