China’s UC browser overtakes Opera Mini in India

This is potentially big. China’s UC Browser has overtaken Opera Mini as the most used mobile browser in India.

As The Next Web reports, UC Web has been on a pretty steady growth curve over the last little while, having passed the 400-million user mark late last year.

It looks like India’s been a pretty big part of that growth too. The most recent stats from StatCounter show that UC Browser now owns around 30% of the Indian market, up from 21.7% a year ago.

On top of that, the company reports, the number of active Androdi-based UC Browser users in India increased 117% between December last year and June this year.

It doesn’t look like it’s going to use that success as excuse to rest on its laurels either. The company has appointed Alibaba founder Jack Ma to its board in a bid to up its game, particularly with regard to monetisation and expanding its business.

Yu Yongfu, chairman and CEO of UCWeb, says:

To further drive development, we’ve invited Jack Ma to join our board. We hope that Jack will bring the tremendous experience he has in building Alibaba to our company, and Alibaba’s strength as the dominant e-commerce platform in China will help accelerate UCWeb’s transformation into a one-stop shop of Internet services.

UC Browser’s success in India could provide massively useful as it looks to expand globally. Expanding to other emerging markets could be a particularly useful way to go. Tencent’s WeChat has demonstrated that, powering its way past 100-million foreign users, mostly in other emerging market regions like Latin America, South East Asia and Southern Africa.