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It’s Labour Day and as I’m in a communist country, I’m eager to enjoy the fruits of the workers’ revolution – so we’ll keep it brief this week.
Being in the PRC, you quickly notice the total blockade on many western websites. Google is gone. WhatsApp doesn’t work. Even LinkedIn is blocked. I guess the CCP doesn’t want people posting AI-generated self-congratulatory messages, which is another solid policy decision on their part.
As most readers will already know, almost every ‘main’ broker URL is blocked. Vantage was the only major firm I could find which does not have its URL blocked in China. That includes companies like IG and CMC Markets.
Interestingly, this is not the case for prop firms. I have not found a single major prop firm that has had its website blocked here. Prop Firm Match has also not been blocked here, unlike the broker sector where several major news and affiliate sites are behind the great firewall.
Of the prop firms I checked, only FundedNext has content that automatically caters to the local audience with a website that is automatically translated into Mandarin. The other 9 I checked did not do anything and are just in the default English mode.
This may just be because prop firms don’t get many customers from China. Indeed, the fact that prop firms are not blocked by the government is potentially a sign that they aren’t being used that much, otherwise they’d already be blacklisted.
On the flip side, this suggests that there may be more opportunities for firms in what is generally one of the largest markets globally for the top-tier retail brokerages.
How you go about doing this is an interesting question. I am not a China market expert but on the broker side it seems almost entirely IB driven. Given prop firms are almost 100% reliant on digital spend, I don’t know how easy it will be for them to access this market.
An interesting question would be whether companies can actually access the local advertising portals. Again, I am not an expert here but the market seems far harder to on board with than Google or Meta is in most countries. Saying you are an education provider is an option but I don’t know if Baidu or WeChat will just let you do that in the same way Google currently does.
However, the final point I think is worth noting is that this is another potential for the cross sell into the brokerage space. If your site is not blocked and you really can market yourself as an educational provider with a prop firm in China, that could work as an interesting branding tool for your brokerage brand.
Just as one example, if you have a brokerage arm and can then set up the main prop firm page to link to your broker’s ‘functional’ Chinese URL, that could be one way of sending traffic to it.
I’m sure there are people who really get the China market, who can pick holes in everything I am saying. But I find it hard to think there is no value in having an entire business line that is not blocked by the great firewall. Or am I wrong?
