A study conducted by iResearch showed that Nokia’s OVI Store is the most frequently visited mobile application store in China.
The OVI Store had 65.2 percent of mobile users who frequently access the store, followed by China Mobile’s Mobile app store at 57.7 percent. If you haven’t already known, China is the world’s largest mobile market with a whopping 755 million mobile subscribers.
Nokia has gained much success in China. Rivaling Jiepang (China’s Foursquare), Nokia has recently partnered with Tencent and Sina to launch a new location-based service in China. The new location service will be built on top of Nokia’s Ovi Map and will also incorporate features from Sina Weibo (China’s Twitter) and Tencent’s QQ services.
Most impressively, Nokia has more than 250 million mobile phone users in China, which explains its dominance in the mobile app market. Nokia might be losing its smartphone market share in the U.S but it is way ahead of Apple and Google in the Chinese market.
Google’s Android application store ranked third with a low 13.7 percent. The figure is expected to rise with Tencent announcing its plan to build an Android powered phone just two weeks ago. Tencent has more than 600 million active accounts on QQ and it would not be a surprise if Tencent’s HiQQ phone sells like hot cakes after launch. Even a 5 percent adoption rate would equate to 30 million phones sold.
Apple’s app store, which launched its Chinese version last year October is ranked fifth at 9.4 percent. We can expect this figure to rise as the Apple craze continues to grow in China. Early last year, Apple said “it is more focused on building the Apple brand in China than achieving strong sales right off the bat.” We shall see how well Apple will perform in China this year.
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