At 28, Fritz Demopoulos came to his second life-altering crossroads. The first had come two years earlier, when he decided to forego an offer by Parker Technologies, the aerospace engineering company he had worked for in Germany since graduating from college.
Parker planned to groom him for a cushy executive job and send him to graduate school in Chicago for free. Demopoulos instead chose to enter the new media industry and returned to his home town, Los Angeles, to pursue an MBA.
Graduating from UCLA with a business degree brought him to his second conundrum: accept a cushy executive job at Disney in glamorous Paris, or take a lower-paying job at News Corporation in not-so-glamorous Beijing.
Apparently, Demopoulos is indifferent toward cushy executive jobs. “Disney offered 30 per cent more plus stock options, but I thought it was harder to get to China. I thought I could always get a job in Europe, it’ll always be there, but China is unique,” he says, adding that, at the time, he could have had the same position at the News Corp Hong Kong bureau, but he lost out to the then-single Wendy Murdoch.
Since living in China, Demopoulos, now 39, has honed in on his dream to be a business owner, a childhood aspiration inherited from his father, who owns a chain of craft-goods stores. In fact, Demopoulos says he knew “even as early as junior high school that I wanted to start a business”.
His first start-up was a poster-distribution company, launched when he was 12. He and his cousin “passed posters out at a local mall while we were on roller skates”. Years later, the entrepreneurial call was so strong that he left News Corp in 1999 to launch sports site Shawei.com (‘brave shark’ in Mandarin), and that success eventually led him to his current site Qunar.com (‘where are you going?’).
Launched in 2005, Qunar is a Mandarin-language travel search engine akin to Kayak.com in the West. While Demopoulos notes that launching such a specialised engine may have seemed an odd choice at the time, he figured that the travel industry would someday explode in China, and he turned to Google for inspiration.
“My partner and I looked very systematically at Google’s four focus services - automotive, travel, financial services and medical healthcare - and we found that travel was the most logical category to build a site around,” he says. “Google’s success made us realise there could be very big vertical opportunities.”
In Qunar’s first year of existence, “not many people understood the concept”; in its second year, the site “began to build a name for itself”; and last year, its third year, “we really kicked a lot of ass”.
Currently, Qunar is the second most popular travel website in the mainland after CTrip.com - an accomplishment, because Qunar operates as a search engine as opposed to an online travel agency.
While Demopoulos says that doing business in the “brutally competitive” Chinese market has its disadvantages, such as having to be flexible as the authorities conjure up rules and regulations seemingly at whim, it is a promising market because more people are going online and looking to travel.
Analysts project that travel will be the fastest-growing digital sector in 2009. This is most apparent in China, which recently overtook the US as the largest internet market in the world, and an eMarketer report last year additionally projects Chinese online travel agency revenues may reach US$1.89 billion by 2011, up from $330 million last year.
“For us, travel was one of the hottest categories, and our entry into the market had a lot to do with timing. You can’t underestimate timing,” he says. “If we had tried this two years later, maybe we’d be number six in the market instead of number two. It’s generally been an upward trajectory, and we’ve been gaining far more momentum than we had a year ago.”
He considers China an excellent launching pad for Qunar because the site has been able to mature with the country’s emerging internet market. Demopoulos is confident Qunar will expand to other markets, potentially going global next year.
“2009 will be our best year. The Chinese are becoming wealthier and there is so much more exposure to sights and sounds and experiences,” he adds. “It’s really spurred an interest in domestic and international travel, and that will help us to expand.”
And while Demopoulos says Qunar will always be precious to him, he will not rule out the possibility of leaving it to launch new businesses in the future.
“I’m an entrepreneur,” he says. “If I’m not doing Qunar, it’ll be something like this. I’ll be working to produce products and services for a company that I love. I’ll always be doing that.”
Fritz Demopoulos’ CV
2008 CEO and co-founder, Qunar.com, Beijing
2003 Consultant, Beijing/Hong Kong
2001 SVP and business director, Netease.com, Beijing
1999 CEO and co-founder, Shawei.com, Beijing/Hong Kong
1997 Business development manager, News Corporation, Beijing
1991 Assistant controller, Parker Technologies, Wiesbaden, Germany; Camarillo, California
