Mary Meeker on China's Online Future

From BusinessWeek: Mary Meeker on China's Online Future

The Morgan Stanley analyst sees the world's largest concentration of young users sparking the rapid development of new products and services Link

"Why so much excitement about China's Internet?
It's the combination of one of the biggest markets in the world with the biggest evolution agents, if you will. They have kind of come together. We have defined it as an emerging market meeting an emerging market. So from an investor standpoint, along with a lot of opportunity and interest, there comes a lot of risk. It's a little bit of either a double benefit or a double whammy. China is the No. 2 market in the world based on the number of Internet users. It will probably be No. 1 in the next two to five years. There are more Internet users under the age of 30 in China than any market in the world, by our estimates.

What do all those young people [about 70 million] mean for the development of the Chinese Net?
Oftentimes, the hotbeds of innovation in technology occur where you have the largest number of young users and the largest number of young engineers. So we actually think that while there hasn't been a tremendous amount of global innovation in the China Internet market -- most of the China Internet companies have adopted models that were developed in other markets first [such as] portal, online advertising, search, and, in effect, imported them to the Chinese market -- we think there's going to be a fair amount of innovation coming out of this market in the next three to five years."