China: A Massive Mobile Market
Jinfo Blog

23rd October 2007

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Seen from three pillars of the mobile market - subscriber base, handset manufacturing, and mobile contents - positive development in all fronts will continue to boost the mobile market in China. Subscriber base: China has more than 500 million mobile phone users http://digbig.com/4ttqq. For the first half year in 2007, more than 40 million Chinese joined the mobile world. Handset manufacturing: Currently there are only 40 plus handset makers licensed for production in China. Manufacturing and selling mobile phones in China was strictly regulated. On October 12 the Chinese State Council announced that it will remove the lengthy handset production approval system and allow mobile phones to be manufactured and sold without licensing requirements http://english.cri.cn/4426/2007/10/22/1601@286384.htm. The deregulation opens new opportunities that not only making it easy for new domestic manufacturers to enter the business and legalizing productions that have been feeding the black market, but also allowing handset makers outside China to flood in to capture a share of the enormously growing market. Mobile contents: Like in many other countries, SMS have been widely adopted by Chinese mobile users (279 billion SMS have been sent by the end of June 2007). Ringing tone downloads are very popular as well. A strong growth is seen in mobile games. A report released recently by Pday Research http://www.pday.com.cn/research/2007/download/A113_HandsetGame.pdf indicated that the number of mobile game users has reached 24 million as of October 2007 and strong growth is expected. Other digital content services and new business models were the focus of the Mobile Multimedia Application Congress held in last July in Beijing http://tech.sina.com.cn/focus/2007_mul/index.shtml. Aside from mobile games, hot topics of mobile contents included news, TV, social networking, and advertising, etc. It was predicted that China's mobile content market will expand from $15bn in 2008 to $21bn by 2012 http://digbig.com/4ttqm. However the development may be hindered by the on-hold status of 3G launch in China http://digbig.com/4ttqk.

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