Scottrade Investment Firm Now Speaks Chinese Online
Around the world, more than 800 million people speak Chinese. It ranks as the most spoken language on the planet.
In the United States, Chinese is the most popular language behind English and Spanish, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, with the highest percentage of Chinese speakers living in California, New York, Hawaii and Massachusetts.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 2.5 million U.S. residents spoke Chinese at home in 2007, up 291 percent from 1980.
To reach out to the millions of Chinese speakers in the United States, St. Louis-based online investment firm Scottrade has launched a Chinese-language online community.
Mirroring Scottrade’s English-language online community, the Chinese version features blogs, group discussions, videos, profiles, photos and file sharing. The English-language community, with more than 42,000 members, debuted in 2008.
Scottrade’s social networking software is provided by Austin, Texas-based Small World Labs.
“Dialogue with our customers is essential,” said Rodger Riney, Scottrade’s founder and CEO. “With our online communities, we’ve further opened up a conversation between our product specialists and our customers.”
Scottrade’s introduction of an online community for Chinese speakers comes as The Boston Consulting Group, Inc. predicts the number of Internet users in China will soar from 384 million today to more than 650 million in 2015. However, the projected figure for 2015 will represent less than half the country’s population.
“China’s 90 percent level of broadband availability—and broadband’s affordability relative to local wages—have laid the foundation for a blistering pace of digital consumption,” the consulting firm said in a report.
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