When Will Mobile Internet In China Be Widespread? (Updated)
Last year I went off on a part business part pleasure trip to Japan. One of the highlights of my ten-day adventure was when I met up with Bill, an alumnus of my alma mater who has been working as a web designer in Osaka for almost twenty years. The laowai from Massachusetts met up with the gaijin (Chinese and Japanese words for “foreigner†respectively) from New Hampshire on the streets of Umeda, a commercial business district in Osaka, Japan. We started by going out for a delicious lunch of okonomiyaki:
The real treat came after lunch when Bill took me to the biggest mobile phone market I have ever stepped foot into in my entire life:
What really blew me away was not the size of the market itself, but the abundant array of features that even the most basic of handsets had to offer. Bar-code readers so people could make payments with their mobile phone, opt-in location-based marketing, and streaming HD television(on the higher-end handsets), just to name a few. The most obvious feature is the widespread usage of the phones to access high quality mobile internet. It is used so much that for many it is their primary channel for internet access and they do not even have a PC at home.
I returned from Japan with one question: When will Chinese netizens make the transition from PC to mobile for many of their internet needs?
Of course a prerequisite is for the technology to be available both in terms of quality and pricing for average consumers. However, what is equally important is for Chinese consumers to be able to incorporate the new technology into their everyday lives. With over 550 million mobile users and 290 million internet users it looks as though Chinese consumers will follow Asian mobile leaders Korea and Japan. Luyi Chen a contributor of the ChinaWeb2.0 Review feels that “no one can truly connect cellphone with the web [in China] other than the carriers.â€
Luyi Chen describes China Mobile’s social network 139.com and provides a brief introduction to China Unicom’s similar service at u-powerbook.com. 139.com is different from other Chinese social networks like Kaixin001 (see post) or Xiaonei (see post), because its focus is on linking the web to the mobile phone. One of the main features enables user to keep a record of their SMS messages, and with billions of SMS messages sent every day in China (according to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology), it is a practical tool for this primary form of inter-personal communication. For more on SMS see these two previous posts here and here.
These services could definitely be combined with mobile internet in the future. The providers of mobile internet after all are companies like China Mobile and China Unicom. Mobile providers can potentially utilize online social network services to monitor and analyze Chinese consumers’ behaviors to discover what they want out of online mobile in China and then adjust their services accordingly. I do not know when China’s mobile industry will be at the level of sophistication of what I saw in Japan, but I can’t wait for the day when I can find out about a sale the second it happens, at a store within a 50 meter radius of my current position and then pay for the product with the swipe of an electronic barcode all with just one phone.
3G is picking up in China and I am curious to hear what your predictions are for China’s mobile market in the near/distant future. Please leave a comment and start the conversation…
UPDATE- Jeremy, an inside observer in Japan, just emailed me with this correction:
The bar-code readers are really for people to scan square-shaped bar-codes, which bring them to the webpage of whatever advertisement/promotion/etc… they are looking at. The phones can be used for payment, just like the Mobil Speedpass stick in the US, by going through a registration process with your cell phone service provider. There is a chip in the phones that is then activated and the phone can be passed over a scanning device when paying for stuff. Even over the train station turnstiles to pay for rides. The amount that you spend is then charged to you on your next cell phone bill, which if you’re like most people, it is directly and automatically withdrawn from your bank account.
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Actually, the article on 139.com on cwrblog.net is not written by me, it is by Luyi Chen, a contributer of the blog.