Helping kids to form good habits

Cinemas, restaurants and various other businesses may have been hurt by the COVID-19 pandemic's fallout, but online education has received a tremendous leg-up from people confined indoors during the lockdown periods.

For instance, Babybus, a Fuzhou-based early education e-content provider, targets children under 7 years of age, and had seen its number of monthly active users stay solid at 75 million from January to March.

It's a number usually reached only during peak seasons of the year like summer and winter vacations, said Babybus co-founder Lu Xueming.

More surprisingly, up to 40 percent of the monthly active users are from overseas, mostly living in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

The extraordinary achievement is largely attributable to the company's go-global plan initiated in 2012, just three years after Babybus' founding. The company first tested waters in two mature markets overseas: the United States and Japan. The result was quite satisfying.

To Lu, the foray into overseas markets represents natural evolution, as online solutions in the early education sector address a rigid demand from young parents.

Lu said: "Like the universal craving for ice cream among young kids, their understanding of the true, the good and the beautiful is the same, which is also what their parents ask for in early education products.

"Parents hope their kids can form good habits and learn basic knowledge such as colors or shapes with the help of playful content. In this sense, it is easier to export early education products as such content is also less difficult to localize."

Based on this understanding, Babybus has come up with more than 170 interactive applications, 2,200 nursery rhymes and animations, as well as over 2,000 audio stories, over the past eight years. With their products covering 144 countries and regions, the company's aggregate number of users worldwide had reached 400 million by the end of last year.

According to Google Play data in March, Babybus ranked seventh among apps with most downloads all over the world. Over the past three months, the educational content provided by Babybus was viewed the most by YouTube users in overseas markets like Japan, Indonesia, the Arab region and Mexico.

Kiki and Miumiu, the animated panda characters which pillared Babybus animations and audio stories, have grown into iconic intellectual properties. The first play based on these two panda comic characters was staged during the third quarter of last year.

Thanks to a partnership with South Korean national TV station CBS, the play debuted in Seoul. To both sides' great surprise, the play was so well received by the local audiences that the theater was jam packed for all performances, and tickets were sold out for all four days of the show.

Given the unexpectedly successful first attempt, the play will continue to be staged in South Korea this year, said Lu.

The positive feedback that Babybus has received in the overseas markets can be largely attributed to its focus on the research and development of products. Among the 900-strong employees of Babybus, more than 90 percent of them specialize in the R&D of content, excelling in their positions like scriptwriters, concept designers, modelers, and visual effect artists.

When it comes to the localization of products, stress is on paying more attention to detail than the localization of language and dubbing.

For example, when the company launches its products and services in Arabian markets such as Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, it made adjustments according to the local festivals, conventions and sensibilities. Pork is not portrayed or mentioned in its content exported to this area, said Lu.

But the road to overseas markets can be bumpy sometimes. Around Christmas of 2014, Babybus was given a warning by Division of Privacy and Identity Protection of the US Federal Trade Commission. The third-party data provider that Babybus worked with in the US had been collecting precise geographic location of the kids, which is illegal in the US.

Lu said: "We took off the navigation function of the apps in a week. Of course, it was a potential risk for us in the overseas market. But it is with this experience that we came to realize the importance of understanding the different regulatory environments and user habits when we are looking for opportunities in other markets.

"More importantly, such setbacks have helped us to perfect our products and make our management comply with international practices."