Here’s our interview with Arndt Focke, the Research and Consulting Manager at GWC (Great Wall Club), the organizers of the upcoming Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing.
We’ll be on the ground covering the event, but as a sort of primer for our readers we thought it would be illuminating to ask Arndt a few questions beforehand.
His answers are, as we expected, very insightful.
1. How is the mobile industry on the rise in China?
“China has over 500 million Internet users and by the end of 2010 over 350 mobile Internet users. With 850 million mobile phone subscribers, 40% use their phones for advanced data services. This percentage goes up to 85% when it comes to 15 to 24 year old China’s youth. 70% are using this data service for more than just MMS and ringtone download.”
“China’s largest Internet players like Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu have developed their own mobile offerings (for e.g. search, SNS, gaming or e-payment) which will support the growth of the market.”
Arndt shared us with this chart which data he noted from Sina last year in December 2010. The chart below shows us the mobile OS breakdown in China.
Arndt cites other examples of how mobile in China and also Japan are on the rise:
- Android’s rise and the smartphone boom in China (which will be driven by aggressive pricing in 2011). In a recent survey by Morgan Stanley, 84% of 2G users and 95% or 3G users in China are planning to buy a smartphone as their next handset. Winners in 2011: Apple and HTC, one of the ‘losers‘ (but still strong) will be Nokia.
- Sina Weibo’s traffic. Sina Weibo recently hit its 100 million users milestone, and over one third of the traffic is deriving from mobile devices.
- Tencent, revenue in 2010, ~3 billion USD, 14% from mobile value added services, how many mobile content providers in the world generate such an amount in a year?
- Gree, mobile SNS in Japan, 435 million USD in 2010 (with over 40% net profit) and over 80% from paid services sales like virtual goods. This company created the 2nd youngest billionaire in the world just after the CEO of Facebook.
- DeNA, ecommerce, mobile SNS and gaming in Japan, even bigger than Gree with over 1.3 billion USD expected sales in 2010, more than double than 2009.
2. Between gaming, m-commerce, location-based services, etc, what is the most lucrative part of the diverse mobile industry right now?
“Mobile gaming in general is strong. It reached RMB 2.6 billion in 2010, up 40% from the year before. Casual gaming (browser games) is growing fast (RMB 32.3 bln in 2010) and the main gaming types are multi-player role games, driven by social networks.
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