McAfee.com Enters Asian Market With Sourcenext

McAfee.com (Nasdaq: MCAF) Tuesday says it is partnering with Sourcenext, a major Japanese computer software developer and publisher, to sell its anti-virus, firewall, privacy and PC utilities applications in more than 200 retail outlets in the Japanese market.

Under the agreement, Sourcenext will be delivering Japanese language versions of
McAfee.com’s VirusScan Online, Personal Firewall and Internet Privacy security
services as well as McAfee.com’s QuickClean and UnInstaller maintenance and
optimization services.

Tokyo-based Sourcenext will also provide Japanese language manuals for these services and develop packaging designed to be more appealing to Japanese consumers. The company will also heavily market the services through print and online advertising as well as in-store promotions.

“The security software market in Japan has increased exponentially over the past several years and it will continue to be the largest increasing segment of the application software market for the foreseeable future,” says Sourcenext president and CEO Noriyuki Matsuda. “We are pleased to be working alongside McAfee.com to deliver their security services to the Japanese market.”

As far as potential markets go, the Asia/Pacific personal computer market is still hot. In 2000 17.3 million units were shipped, invoking a 30 percent increase over 1999 shipments, according to recent estimates by Dataquest.

While Sunnyvale, Calif.-based McAfee.com sells directly to overseas Web users, the agreement is McAfee’s first attempt to localize its services in the emerging Asian market.

“It was an easy decision to partner with Sourcenext on our Japanese expansion initiative,” says McAfee.com president & CEO Srivats Sampath. “Their leadership in the Japanese consumer software market will give us the ability to rapidly reach a broad base of Japanese users with our security Web services.”

Sampath is hoping a successful partnership this time around may pave the way to direct expansion into other global markets.

McAfee should have an easy go at that goal, based on the recent partnering between itself and Microsoft
(Nasdaq: MSFT) on the .NET initiative.