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China Mobile Shares more with App DevelopersBEIJING, Aug 14, 2009 (SinoCast Daily Business Beat via COMTEX) -- "The developers for Apple's App Store are the envy of us, and now we are accounting on the opportunities brought about by China Mobile's (SEHK: 0941, NYSE: CHL) online application store, Mobile Market," says Liu Qing, an application developer at a value-added telecom service company. Taking a page from Apple's playbook, the Chinese telecom carrier is scheduled to kick off the Mobile Market on August 17, enabling its mobile phone subscribers to download applications, phone themes, music, videos, and e-books via their mobile phones. Third-party developers can add apps for multiple operating systems and it will be easily accessible through the store, with revenues to be split 30:70 between China Mobile and application developers, the same with the split Apple offers developers of iPhone applications. Mr. Liu has registered with the developer's community of China Mobile. "It is as easy as registering with a BBS, and China Mobile offers the upload channel, operation platform, and the charging system." In terms of the latest data released by Apple this August, its App Store recorded 1.5 billion downloads in just one year since its inception. The App Store so far has a selection of 65,000 applications and over 100,000 developers. Apple has sold more than 40 million devices such as iPhone and iPod that can run applications downloaded from the App Store. China Mobile has scored over 400 million mobile phone users, ten times that of Apple. China Mobile has set goals of developing 20 million Mobile Market users by the end of 2010 and brining the number of downloads to 100 million. The mobile data unit under China Mobile has been charged to operate the Mobile Market. And ASPire Technologies and China Mobile's branch in Guangdong are responsible to lick the store into shape. To stay ahead of the curve in the mobile Internet market, China Mobile has developed the mobile operating system OMS and came up with a plan to roll out the OMS-based Mobile Market. The telecom carrier has pinned high hopes on the app store that is expected to generate a large bulk of value-added telecom revenues for it. China Mobile is seeking to make the online store accessible in some provinces on a trial basis. Moreover, it is intent on integrating some value-added services and mobile phone applications sold previously on the Monternet into the new app store. These services and applications used to be outsourced to service providers. Now China Mobile hopes to take them back and operate them on its own. (USD 1 = CNY 6.84) Source: dycj.ynet.com (August 14, 2009) |