HONG KONG – (ACN Newswire) – This week Mobvista became just the latest Chinese tech company with global ambitions to announce its plans to go public, by announcing the listing of its shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (1860.HK).
In a year which has seen the biggest number of Chinese tech companies make their stock market debut on the HKEX since 1995, Mobvista is just the latest to seek to raise funding as part of its vision for global growth and success.
From start-up to a global company
Founded in 2013, Mobvista is a technology platform that provides mobile advertising and mobile analytics services to the global ecosystem of mobile app developers. Through its advertising, monetization and mobile analytics technologies, Mobvista helps app creators across the entire lifecycle of launching, promoting and understanding the performance of their apps.
The marketing and monetization of mobile apps are big business. According to iResearch, 192 billion apps were downloaded in 2017 – and that number is set to almost double by 2022. Mobile advertising is the biggest revenue driver of the mobile app ecosystem. Global revenues from mobile ads grew to US$142.5 billion in 2017, and are estimated to reach almost US$316.5 billion by the end of 2022.
Established only five years ago, Mobvista has quickly grown to become the only Chinese company among the world?s top ten third-party mobile advertising platforms. As a key player in a booming industry, Google, Facebook and Mobvista are the three most popular advertising networks with Chinese app companies targeting the global market. According to iResearch, during the five months ended June 30, 2018, 33 of the top 50 Chinese global apps use Mobvista’s monetization SDK for monetization services, and 45 of the top 50 Chinese global apps use Mobvista’s user acquisition services.
Looking to the future of the mobile advertising industry
With plenty of success already, the company doesn’t plan to slow down any time soon. Led by the CEO and Co-Founder, Mr Duan Wei, Mobvista is making strategic plans for both its own future and the future of the global app industry.
Firstly, the company plans to increase R&D investment as a means to consolidate the company’s leadership in the market and continue to grow its revenues, which reached US$312 million by the end of 2017. Mobvista has already made significant investments into its own AI and Big Data technologies, and almost 50% of the global employees are involved in research and development. Close to 7% of the company’s revenues are spent on R&D.
Secondly, the company will continue to seek high-quality investment and M&A targets that will help it to achieve its strategic goals. In 2016 Mobvista successively acquired the US-based mobile marketing company NativeX, and shortly afterwards acquired GameAnalytics, a well-known SaaS game data analysis platform in Europe. Both businesses have become an important part of Mobvista’s end-to-end approach.
Programmatic advertising, Big Data and AI
Two of the key technologies driving the growth of the mobile advertising industry are Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI). By using AI to better understand the interests and preferences of consumers, Mobvista is able to better match the right advertising to the right consumer, improving both the performance of marketing campaigns and the revenues of its customers.
Mobvista’s Big Data platform captures ad interaction data from 900 million unique mobile devices every day, with a further 330 million consumers a day interacting with the Mobvista via its monetization SDK. In addition, some 49,000 mobile games are using the GameAnalytics SDK, which captures data on up to 88 million Daily Active Users (DAU).
All of this data is used by Mobvista to create a detailed understanding of consumer behaviours which can then be modelled in real time to accurately deliver programmatic ad placements according to those behaviours.
Mobile advertising – a growing global industry
It is programmatic advertising technology which is the key driver of the global advertising industry. Having already become the dominant form of advertising on the web, mobile programmatic advertising is expected to increase from US$27.3 billion in 2017 to US$69 billion in 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of 20.4%. This means that Mobvista is well placed to benefit from this significant market growth.
Another factor in Mobvista’s success is the rising cost to app companies of acquiring new users. According to iResearch, User Acquisition costs (UA) now average US$2.64 for every successful install, and will rise by 16% per year from now until 2022. With app companies looking to minimise costs and maximise reach, it is programmatic advertising technology that can match advertisers and media with the greatest speed and efficiency. In every market around the world, developers and publishers are constantly looking for the most cost-effective, accurate solutions for marketing and monetizing their apps.
Today, Mobvista works with advertisers in more than 60 countries across a mix of games, utilities, e-commerce and social media content. In key international and regional markets such as the United States, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand, Mobvista repeatedly ranks as one of the top 3 advertising platforms used by the top 20 most downloaded apps in those places.
Global growth, local expertise
Whilst Mobvista has set its sights on becoming a truly global business, it also understands the importance of local expertise.
The most popular mobile app companies have become successful through understanding the local needs of their users and tailoring their apps accordingly. This is the same approach taken by Mobvista, which calls this its ‘Glocal’ strategy, enhancing its local service capabilities at the same time as expanding its global business network.
As more and more app companies look to go global, they need to work with partners that understand the different requirements of local markets and how to successfully navigate them. With offices in key markets around the world, supported by world-class technologies, Mobvista has the knowledge and scale to be the ideal partner.
And with the Chinese app market now being one of the biggest, there is a huge opportunity for Mobvista to help companies in established and emerging markets launch in China. At the same time, many Chinese companies are looking for help to go global and reach new markets outside of China. So as a company with a foot in both markets, Mobvista would seem to have a unique opportunity to help app businesses on both sides.