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China Mobile Eyes Mobile Internet Market
(SinoCast China IT Week Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) BEIJING, November 29, SinoCast -- China Mobile, the world's largest mobile telecom carrier in terms of subscribers, is ambitious to foray into the Internet market.
China Mobile Board Chairman and Chief Executive Officer had mentioned the integration between mobile telecom and Internet for several times. They are destined to integrate, Wang noted at the International Mobile Internet Conference on November 27.
Mobile phone makers and Internet companies are posing new challenges to telecom operator when they launch various wireless services. Thus, carriers have to take measures to enhance their technology and adjust operating modes.
China Mobile, Wang disclosed, has joined hands with Google and Microsoft on the research and development of mobile phone operating systems.
The company considers value-added services as one of the three major forces for its growth.
Its current valued-added services based on mobile Internet include mobile phone newspaper, mobile phone search, mobile phone payment, and mobile phone tracking. Revenue from non-voice business, namely value-added services, has accounted for 25 percent of the company's total.
China's mobile phone and Internet users respectively hit 400 million and 100 million last year, according to statistics by the Ministry of Information Industry.
The telecom carrier's branch in south China's Guangdong province earlier announced the free mobile emails with unlimited storage capacity, supporting at most 50M attachments.
What is more, Mobile phone users subscribed to the new service can send 30 short messages and 20 multimedia short messages each month free of charge. And they will be presented with 1GB mobile phone online hard disk.
As of June 30, 2007, the number of China Mobile subscribers was 332.378 million with a net rise of 31.146 million and an average monthly net rise of more than 5 million.
Average revenues per minute from its voice business slid 19.3 percent year on year in the first half of 2007 while revenues from the value-added services leaped 35.5 percent.
Revenues from the value-added service has accounted for 25.2 percent of the company's total operating turnover.
Based in Beijing, China Mobile now is attaching more attention to wireless Internet, including wireless music download, WAP portal, wireless online search, and Fetion, an instant messaging service.
Notably, the company has performed well in its mobile phone wireless music service. By now, its wireless music club has owned 48 million members.
It has started its GPRS upgrade in some Chinese cities, in a bid to compete with its archrival China Unicom, who is also upgrading its own service network.
Copyright 2007 Sinocast LLC, Source: The Financial Times Limited
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