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Taobao, Gionee Launch Shopping PhoneSHANGHAI, Oct 29, 2012 (SinoCast Daily Business Beat via COMTEX) -- Taobao.com, the C2C unit of Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba Group, announced launch of a shopping mobile phone with homegrown mobile phone maker Gionee days ago. The terminal, namely GN858, is embedded TaoBao Smart, the latest shopping solution launched by Taobao.com and with it, users are allowed to collect vendors on Taobao.com through the mode of desktop shortcut directly. In the meantime, they are allowed to search commodities through voice, word and two-dimensional code. People in the know said that it was a win-win deal as through this, Taobao.com would well implement its mobile shopping strategy while Gionee would have a try of launching a terminal for the ecommerce channel. Targets of the product were consumers that preferred to go shopping through the Internet and whether it would be welcome by the targets mainly depended on the market. This was another strategic move Alibaba taken after its cooperation with Acer over mobile phone was cracked down by Google. The Taiwan-based PC maker planned to hold a press conference for A800, a smartphone cooperated with Aliyun.com, a subsidiary of Alibaba, on September 13 this year. However, the press conference was cancelled one hour before the schedule suddenly. Aliyu.com said in a statement later that it was Google that stopped it from holding the press conference and provided that it determined to launch the terminal, Google would withdraw its Android OS license. Li Yanyan, an analyst with Analysys International, said that there were several factors that urged Internet giants in the market to stretch out reach to mobile phones and in addition to huge value of the mobile Internet, high cost of pro-installation played an important role. They had not only capital but also channels and content sources. And open-source of the Android operating system helped them a lot in reducing development cost of terminals. Mobile shopping contributed to not much of the online shopping nowadays, but it would become a trend and an increasing number of consumers would choose this shopping mode as time went by. Thus Internet giants including Alibaba and Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU), the biggest online search service provider in the market, had cast eye on the field. Data from Analysys International show that China saw sales volume of mobile phones (excluding smuggled and copycat ones) reach 66.47 million units in the second quarter of this year and among them, 38.19 million ones were smartphones, up 22.5 percent from a quarter ago and 127.1 percent from a year earlier. And in the smartphone sector, the share jointly seized by four homegrown Chinese mobile phone makers including ZTE, Huawei, Yulong Computer, and Lenovo hit over 40 percent. (USD 1 = CNY 6.24) Source: www.qq.com (October 29, 2012) |