For simply holding these coins in a wallet you generate dividends known as GAS. Check out
https://neotogas.com/ to see how much GAS you can generate. GAS today is worth $35 USD so not a bad dividend to receive. Also this is 'China's Ethereum' being highly scalable at 10,000 transactions per second!
You said it - because NEO is 'China's Ethereum'.
China/Asia is the main crypto-currencies engine and user so I guess we will see a lot NEO ICO projects during 2018 and the price will goes few times higher. I'm holding enough