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What has this internet company done in 8 years

Do you remember 2013? At the time, touch screen phones were still very fresh. 4G had just gone from experimental to commercial use, and WeChat began to refresh our social experience...In this era of mobile internet transition from “budding” to “booming,” Mobvista was born.$MOBVISTA (01860.HK)$

Today, from a small team of a few people, Mobvista has become a global technology platform distributed around the world, providing developers with products and services covering the entire life cycle of apps, such as marketing, technology, and data.

What has made us grow so far? Where are we going next?

Time is the most faithful chronicler. Let's reunderstand what is Mobvista through time and numbers.

From “advertising” to “making products”to “Doing the SaaS Tool Ecosystem”

Beginning in 2010, the wave of going out to sea in China has begun. The domestic market is gradually moving towards the Red Sea. Whether they are major Internet companies or entrepreneurs, they all realize that the time has come to grab overseas.

Duan Wei, who graduated from Zhejiang University, is one of them. Keenly smelling the huge business opportunities of mobile internet, Duan Wei joined UC. As the Director of Marketing Operations of the International Business Department, he helped the number of monthly active users of UC products surged by nearly 100 million and accumulated comprehensive overseas promotion experience.

In this “Big Sailing” era, several young people, led by Duan Wei, saw blue ocean opportunities to go overseas and develop. In particular, tool applications such as input methods, anti-virus, and browsers are growing rapidly.In 2013, they founded a company called Mobvista in an office in Pazhou, Guangzhou.

Starting with providing affiliate promotion services, Mobvista has helped overseas apps capture batch after batch of users. Back then, behind the top of the list of apps, most were supported by Mobvista.The ad is a ferry for Chinese developers to go overseas.

To break through growth bottlenecks,Based on online alliances, Mobvista has gradually extended its business reach to large media campaigns.We have established strategic partnerships with many major media giants such as Google, Facebook, and Snapchat, to find a large number of users for advertisers.

In 2015, to reap the dividends of going abroad, Mobvista set its sights on programmatic advertising.At the time, it seemed that this kind of accurate advertising delivery through digital technology would be a future trend. And history tells us it was the right choice.

I had no experience in product development, so I started exploring from scratch.In June of the same year, Mintegral was launched as a programmatic interactive advertising platform.In just 6 months, the SDK DAU surpassed 50 million. Countless app and mobile game developers have earned their first pot of gold through our Mintegral.

The rise of programmatic advertising is an important “incision” for Mobvista in the digital transformation process. What is behind non-programmatic transactions to programmatic transactions is a shift from low-frequency optimization where operations lead transaction matching to high-frequency optimization dominated by machines and algorithms. This is a transition that Huiliang Technology has completed based on the evolution of effects.

In 2016, Mobvista acquired European mobile game data analysis company GameAnalytics.GameAnalytics provides mobile game developers with free, professional in-app user behavior data analysis as a reference for game retention and traffic monetization.

This is Mobvista 2.0, which uses products and technology to improve the efficiency of ad delivery. Mobvista is building the second curve of a “programmatic advertising platform” outside of the “Overseas Alliance Ad Service Provider”.

At a time when the business was making great strides, the role of technology accumulation gradually became apparent.

In 2018, Mobvista's technical team developed SpotMax, a large-scale elastic cluster management platform, and reduced its own ad request costs by 65% compared to 2017.In 2020, SpotMax was officially launched on the market to solve the problem of elastic demand for cloud computing for more enterprises and drastically reduce the cost of using the cloud.In January 2021, the SpotMax solution was officially launched on the AWS Marketplace global marketplace, serving AWS's huge global customer cohort.

In the past 2020, we also launched technology products in programmatic advertising and big media delivery businesses: playable ad production platform Playturbo and one-stop automated advertising platform XMP were launched one after another to achieve higher growth and revenue for developers and advertisers.

Today's mobile apps are in full bloom, and the penetration rate of digital and intelligent SaaS tools is constantly increasing on the development path from small to large developers.

We are gradually building a complete solution, from statistical attribution, ad monetization, cross-channel delivery, programmatic creativity, to more basic aspects such as cloud server optimization management. This is Mobvista 3.0.

Mobvista's growth is not simply a large-scale expansion; it has evolved into an increasingly complete ecosystem. A diverse and rich SaaS tool ecosystem provides global developers with efficient tools to improve growth efficiency and expand the market market.

An aggressive international strategy and diverse team

In Mobvista's 8-year growth path, internationalization is an important growth point.

The degree of development of the global Internet varies, and there are still unlimited opportunities in many regional markets, and it is still in the first half. The international market is also large enough to allow every ambitious company to make a big difference on the world stage.

Beginning in 2014, Mobvista established its first local office in India.In 2017, we proposed “Glocal” — or Global+Local, which will combine a global vision with localized services to provide customers around the world with richer international services.Whether it's talent, strategy, or resources, we help every advertiser truly go abroad.

To date, we have 18 offices around the world and are serving mobile app developers in more than 85 countries around the world.Integrating with the international community and moving towards globalization is the only way we can continue to break through the ceiling of development.

As we traveled all over the world, the team became more diverse.

At Mobvista, you can meet cute girls from Japan and South Korea, share the latest mobile games with young South Americans, and exchange aurora experiences with Russian students... The diverse team promotes more innovation and is also better implementing the “Glocal” strategy: accurately understanding the needs of customers in different markets around the world to provide them with more customized products and services.

Diversity is reflected not only in cultural backgrounds, but also in various majors.

Starting with internet digital marketing, technology-driven seeds have been planted. There is no shortage of marketing talents, creative minds, and product technology experts.

The “SaaS tool ecosystem” we are committed to building consists of universal products one by one. Only by separating from the specific environment can we truly integrate into this world with strong and suitable products.

Technology, as the underlying logic, connects the chain of tool ecosystems and provides possibilities for product decentralization. In this way, our products can better achieve higher value for enterprises and help them grow steadily.

Financing, acquisitions, listing... an ever-expanding impact landscape

Since its inception and growth, Mobvista's rapid expansion has been inseparable from social and capital support.

From 2014 to 2016, Mobvista completed Series A, Series B, and Series C financing successively. Investors include funds from major domestic internet companies and media giants.In 2018, Mobvista was officially listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

The expansion of capital not only supports technology research and development, but also pushes the business to expand in different fields and overseas markets. Thus, performance and profit performance are enhanced, and investors are provided with considerable returns.

In 2016, Mobvista acquired Nativex, a global mobile advertising native platform, and GameAnalytics, a European mobile game data analysis platform.

While upgrading application developer services, Mobvista is also a rising Chinese internet star, standing on the world stage and receiving industry attention.

In 2020, Mobvista celebrated its 7th birthday and underwent a brand renewal.

It was announced that it was born with bright contrasting colors, Mobvista became a group brand, faded out of the front line of business, and better supported the matrification of all sub-brands.Through SaaS products, PaaS products and services, we add media, creativity, data, cloud and other resource sections to the “tool ecosystem” puzzle for global application developers to meet developers' needs.

To infinity and beyond

Up until today, the energy of continuous improvement and the mentality of transcending infinity have together shaped the Mobvista you and I have seen today. If I were to use a symbol to show this mentality, it would be ∞, the symbol of infinity.

For 8 years, Mobvista has been driven forward by a consistent “∞”:

Our talents, big data, and underlying technical capabilities have gradually evolved into general organizational capabilities; we are not limited to marketing media business and have begun to explore more boundaries; we are breaking through in-depth one-way growth and hope to build a large-scale ecosystem that continuously breaks through boundaries...

Looking back, I can better understand why we set out.There are no limits, no limits, and infinity exists to transcend borders. That's the direction we're running in right now.

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