alt Hacker News> Chinese companies have always had a very low willingness to pay for software
Are we still left with this mindset? Maybe once upon a time but it has definitely been changing.
There's plenty of B2B and enterprise SaaS companies in China serving the Chinese market. Maybe not as many, but no longer the very low of the past.
I also would not say enterprise were not willing to pay, even many years ago. It's the SME that refused to pay. Large CRM, ERPs etc have always existed.
I would say I'm still in this mindset. Numbers are hard to come by but analysts optimistically put Chinese SaaS market at ~10% of the size of the US. Also I see that the gross margin for public Chinese SaaS is around 50% vs 80% for the US reflecting that SaaS in China is much more services and implementation heavy. So it feels like the direct to business SaaS's like Salesforce aren't really there and then then the selling to SaaS titans like Datadog have a much smaller flywheel to work in.
Happy to be wrong though if I'm missing something.