China’s drive to replace foreign hardware and software with domestic alternatives has achieved a milestone, as WPS Office – a long-existing local substitute for Microsoft Office – achieved 100 million daily active users.
The desktop version of WPS, marketed as being “highly compatible” with Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, is accessed by more than 100 million devices in China every day, according to a post published on Monday by developer Kingsoft Office Software.
Microsoft Office remains popular in China. But as Beijing’s cybersecurity concerns have grown amid tensions with Washington, WPS has become more widely used in strategically important sectors, such as government, finance and telecommunications.
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When a Microsoft Windows outage in July caused widespread disruptions from Hong Kong to Australia, mainland China’s key infrastructure operators such as airlines and banks were largely unaffected. Their relative immunity to the outage showed China’s reduced reliance on foreign service providers, including Microsoft.
Airports in mainland China largely avoided a Microsoft outage that affected travellers worldwide in July 2024. Photo: Dickson Lee alt=Airports in mainland China largely avoided a Microsoft outage that affected travellers worldwide in July 2024. Photo: Dickson Lee>
Launched in 1988 – five years after Microsoft released Word – WPS was the mainland’s first home-grown Chinese-language word-processing system. It was not until 1992 that Microsoft set up operations in China, allowing WPS ample time to establish a loyal user base.
In 2001, Kingsoft Office introduced a full office suite, including a word processor, a spreadsheet editor and a presentation program.
Besides WPS, Kingsoft Office also offers the enterprise collaboration tool, WPS 365, and artificial-intelligence assistant, WPS AI.
Kingsoft Corporation – parent of Kingsoft Office and other subsidiaries spanning video game development, mobile apps and cloud storage – went public in Hong Kong in 2007.
The company posted 1.2 billion yuan (US$164 million) in third-quarter revenue for its office software and services in 2024, up nearly 10 per cent from a year earlier on the growth of its domestic individual office subscription business. Monthly active users of its office software reached 618 million in September.
