With China's virtual reality (VR) market heating up, China-based VR start-ups have begun to push what they calim to be their unique VR technologies. China-based first-tier Internet service providers Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent have also been aggressively tapping the VR market. As non-China VR players are also looking to expand in China, competition in the China VR market is expected to grow fierce, according to a Chinese-language 21Jingji.com report.
In 2015, over 200 start-ups invested a total of US$3.5 billion in the VR business in China and these companies expect the VR market to take off in 2016 and have been releasing products for the market.
However, many China-based VR start-ups are concerned about the competition from international first-tier players and believe many of China-based players could bow out, especially when the market is still lacking a unified standard.
Since first-tier VR players all have their unique in-house developed system architectures, most China-based start-ups are unlikely to have such an advantage and will likely lose out in the competition, leaving only a few players to compete.
Alibaba has recently announced to establish a VR experiment center to help develop VR content and hardware. Tencent also released VR SDK and developer support project in December 2015 for the industry, while Baidu has release a VR channel.
Currently, China-based VR players are still not able to produce their chips and require support from Qualcomm and Intel. This also become a disadvantage to the China VR players.
