China's effort to fast track the replacement of foreign hardware and software with domestic alternatives has achieved a milestone, as WPS Office - a long-existing local substitute for Microsoft Office - achieved 100 million daily active users.
The desktop version of WPS, marketed as being "highly compatible" with Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, is accessed by more than 100 million devices in China every day, according to a post published last 31 December 2024 by developer Kingsoft Office Software.
Microsoft Office remains popular in China. But as Beijing's cybersecurity concerns have grown amid tensions with Washington, WPS has become more widely used in strategically important sectors, such as government, finance and telecommunications.
When a Microsoft Windows outage in July caused widespread disruptions from Hong Kong to Australia, mainland China's key infrastructure operators such as airlines and banks were largely unaffected. Their relative immunity to the outage showed China's reduced reliance on foreign service providers, including Microsoft.
Launched in 1988 - five years after Microsoft released Word - WPS was the mainland's first home-grown Chinese-language word-processing system. It was not until 1992 that Microsoft set up operations in China, allowing WPS ample time to establish a loyal user base.
In 2001, Kingsoft Office introduced a full office suite, including a word processor, a spreadsheet editor and a presentation program.
Besides WPS, Kingsoft Office also offers the enterprise collaboration tool, WPS 365, and artificial-intelligence assistant, WPS AI.
Kingsoft Corporation - parent of Kingsoft Office and other subsidiaries spanning video game development, mobile apps and cloud storage - went public in Hong Kong in 2007.
The company posted 1.2 billion yuan (US$164 million) in third-quarter revenue for its office software and services in 2024, up nearly 10 per cent from a year earlier on the growth of its domestic individual office subscription business. Monthly active users of its office software reached 618 million in September.
Despite its popularity, WPS has been accused of censoring private documents.
In 2022, a Chinese novelist said WPS locked her out of her own work, warning that "the file may contain sensitive content". At the time, WPS said it "never censors, locks or deletes users' local files", but added that it was "obliged to review all content distributed through its platform" in accordance with Chinese laws.
In August 2024, WPS suffered an hours-long outage. To placate users, it has been offering all users a free 15-day membership.
No comments:
Post a Comment