Phyniks- Note a few things- the original report of the ban came from the China Daily and not an official Governmental source; so far Symantec has not received notice of being precluded from use by any Chinese government department (have no clue regarding Kaspersky). But even if this was the case, various Chinese departments have been moving to Qihoo lately anyway.
Also, most of the Chinese economic growth is in the hands of private enterprise, thus still allowing Symantec room to grow. Whether or not any growth is occurring is disputed. Although Symantec does not break down revenue for a specific country, it does provide numbers for the Asia region, and year over year comparison shows a 2% decrease to 1.74 billion USD (the decrease probably due to a slowdown in Japan).
Hope this helped.
Also something that should be noticed is that Symantec did not lose cash within the Asian region as a result of any ban.
However the market does see some new names popping up and Qihoo is one of them that takes a slice of the pie.
One of the main reasons for the Asian market to take Qihoo over western companies like Symantec is not the protection or services for that matter, but pure and alone as a nationalistic control for censorship.
Qihoo can be controlled while Symantec cannot, and with the eastern posturing and the western spy scandals this was to be expected.
As mentioned above the private enterprise does allow Symantec to grow yet it favors Asian developed software as the "Beijing Rhetoric" and propaganda is clamping down on everything western. And Beijing does not mind sacrificing security and switch to a lesser product as long its not western and as long it does serve domestic consumption.
So i assume that more bigger names will see a sales drop in Asian regions, but down the line as long Asia is producing second class software they will still be needing western key players to provide that little boost till their own industry is well enough developed to maintain the market within China.
In the end of the day its all apples and eggs, because IF specific technology used in Operating Systems, Security Solutions and other software and hardware that is not yet available or mature enough within the Asian industry is, they still going to demand western alternatives, considering the fact that the Asian ICT market is still developing and western ICT technology has a distinct edge for the time being.
So even with the "Beijing Rhetoric" they still will deploy Windows OS and western hardware & software if no Asian alternative can be found.
