China is Evernote's top priority

Although it took more than a year for Evernote to reach 6.5 million users in China, the Silicon Valley-based company that develops software to help people take daily notes has high hopes for the world's largest base of Internet users.

Evernote started operations in China last year, launching its China-exclusive Mandarin-language Yinxiang Biji ("memory notes"). It wasn't long after the launch before China overtook Japan to become the company's second-biggest market (after the US).

"Although we are still small compared with lot of big international companies in China, we are making progress every day," Amy Gu, Evernote's general manager in China, told China Daily at a workshop on Saturday at the company's Redwood City, California headquarters.

"Right now, our top priority is building Evernote in China, including what we can do better to improve the product, partnerships and the customer support," Gu said.

Going local is the strategy for the company's Beijing operation. "Our product is localized in Chinese, and we have local partnerships, including Tencent and Sina, as well as many app stores," she explained. "Having those localized collaborations is a great way to build our products there."

More and more foreign companies are coming to recognize the growing power of social media in China, and Evernote is no exception. It already offers 10 social media channels in the country, and its official micro blog account on Sina Weibo has more than 50,000 followers with almost 5,000 posts.

"We rely a lot on Chinese social media," Gu said. "We keep posting content on those social media to let people get all sorts of information from us; we want our social media market to continue to gain positive power everyday from there."

In the past year, Evernote's Beijing office staff has grown from just Gu herself to 22 employees.

"The thing we did in China - and we've done every place in the world that we put offices - is we don't send experts from the US into a foreign market, we hire local people who are smart and want to work at Evernote," said Ken Gullicksen, Evernote's COO.

"It's a great career development thing for them to work in an international company," Gullicksen said. "For us, that works exceptionally well as we hire people who are already fans of Evernote and love our product. That makes them super productive."

Gullicksen emphasized that their operation in China is not just promotion, but a full office. The service that Evernote runs in China includes an operations team, developers, marketing and PR, customer service and engineering.

"It's almost like a mini Evernote clone, a separate instance of Evernote. The China operation is very different than our presence in other international markets; it's much more extensive," he said.

Gullicksen said the main Evernote users in China are people who make their living in the information sector. "That's the fastest growing population everywhere in the world, especially in China. In a modern economy, those are knowledge workers," he said.

"China's economy is growing very rapidly, and a large part of that is a huge growth in the knowledge worker population who will generate productivity. Our goal is to help facilitate, help make that population smarter and more productive in their work lives," Gullicksen said.

"We do that everywhere we are around the world, but I think it's a special opportunity in China," he added.

yuwei12@chinadailyusa.com