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Comment by dr1337 | Hacker News Reader

I've never really understood the US-centricity of most tech companies. Sure the US will always be the single biggest market but times are changing. With the rise of the middle class in the emerging economies and the global redistribution of wealth from the West to the rest, there are huge opportunities to leapfrog US-centric companies.

Apple is probably the best example of a company that realises the opportunity of building a supply chain that can satisfy the demand of their goods on a global level.

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Nno other relatively homogenous market even comes close to US market size.

The EU is great, a lot of regulations have been standardised, but it's still a place with 24 different languages, twelve different currencies, different national systems (e.g. payment systems, shipping, retail outlets, marketing channels), culture etc. It's still very much a fragmented place. So the UK, France, Germany, Italy are still to a substantial extent separate markets, all of which are less than a quarter the size of the US.

Japan probably comes closest to the US.

Then there's China, it has the gdp, but not the gdp per capita. You can take $50 a day as a threshold for the type of targeted consumer class for example, that's about $18k a year. If you look at income distributions in China you'll find only about 10 million Chinese qualify. If you take a $20 a day / $7k a year figure, you get to about 100 million people. Japan is similar, around 100m. The US figure for this group is 300 million.

I mean don't get me wrong, you can't only have a US-focus. But I hardly see any companies do that. Instead they do first-launches in key markets and expand later on, and that makes sense.

Some data from Pew: https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/

Doesn't Android have massively more global market share than iOS?

It does but not where it matters. You want places that are willing to fork out big money for flagship phones. An example of this would be China vs India.

China is a better market to be in to maximise profitability as the Chinese are more likely to fork out USD 799 for a phone than the Indians. It's almost mind-boggling how one company can capture so much share of profits.

Tangent, but I think we've hit peak flagship phone. Mid-range androids and 2-year old iPhones are still overpowered for 90% of users.

It doesn’t have much of the profit, though.

“Canalys analysts note that the rapid growth of smart speaker sales outside the U.S. and Google’s strength with channel partners helped it vault past Amazon. A news release on the study comments that, “Google’s success comes on the back of shipments into new markets, such as India,”

Both Google and Amazon are aggressively expanding overseas with their assistants. Amazon is putting the Echo in 80 countries:

https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-bringing-echo-alexa-80-...

Yep. Foreign certifications take time, and standards for manufacturing, communication/signal interference, and more vary, but not serving the world as quickly as possible is a bad plan for growth or community enthusiasm.

(Story time: As someone who had to find creative means to get SO many US-only goods into Canada, even ages after their US release, this is terrible with electronics. Shure headphones were the worst, where there was no Canadian distributor, so I ended up special-ordering through an audiology clinic.)

The whole reason I went Windows Phone > Android > iOS was because Microsoft took 17 months to get their latest Lumia phone to singapore. Despite the fact windows phone was used a lot in Asia. Microsoft killed themselves off by not being able to do what Apple can do with world wide release. Now I never see windows phones at all in Asia.

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