China looks like the land of opportunity for companies including those in education. While the size of the market is huge, Western companies find it very challenging and we believe that a lack of language skills is one of the most significant barriers to success in China. While there are lots of ways to learn Chinese, we developed our language teaching software to help students achieve basic literacy before they get frustrated and give up.

Learning Chinese for Westerners is difficult, much more so, than learning French; and the majority of students simply give up. But without a good grasp of the language it is almost impossible to study or to do business in China. In the UK, schools and tertiary institutions understand this issue, but finding the right tools to help students has been a problem.

Our first exposure to this market came when Oxford University Press licensed a version of our software to go with their new Pocket Chinese Dictionary. This has been very successful in the UK, the USA and in several export markets, but we have also kept developing newer versions for both Western and the Chinese markets.

The decision by Richard Cairns of Brighton College to have all of his students study Chinese is a very smart one. If they persist and achieve a reasonable standard they will have a huge advantage over their bilingual contemporaries who have focused on European languages. While the EU may seem like the most important economy to many people in the UK its growth and prospects are dwarfed by China.

In education I believe that learning Chinese will become more and more important and we may even see a shift in the tertiary education market with more and more Western students going to study in China and less Chinese students studying in the West. This change may take ten or more years to occur but the impact at every level of education if it does will be profound and it is something that is already influencing the thinking of my Australian colleagues both in universities and in the private sector (both in education and elsewhere). Learning Chinese by whatever system you might choose will never be easy, and most Chinese business people I have met hope it stays that way.

We hope our software will help make things a little easier and having our work recognised in the UK by organisations like Oxford University has helped. But even with this experience our company just like your organisation(s) still face the same difficulties in cracking the Chinese market.

Our key advantage is we don’t just sell a product developed by someone else, everyone at Purple Panda uses one of our products every day and that link helps not only keep us close to out market it also gives us a sustainable competitive advantage in business based purely on education.

www.purplepanda.com.au