Shanghaivest in the news > Mobile Commerce in China
Organizer on MobileMonday Shanghai 8 March 2010 http://www.mobilemondayshanghai.net/
Two very enticing presentations from Taobao Wireless Dpt Director, Song Man Yuan, and Harry Liu, CEO of TreasureBeam, sole mobile commerce and payment partner of Guangdong Mobile. Two other companies, PayPal China (M. Michael Zhao, Head of China Integration) and HandPay (M. Chen Dihao, Marketing Director) joined us for the panel discussion.
Some trends first: for operator-driven m-commerce transactions, utility payment and ticketing (lottery, bus tickets, air tickets etc) are by far the most popular items. Ticketing is also avery fast growing category on Taobao wireless which is not dependent on operator billing but leveraging on Alipay mobile payment gateway. For TreasureBeam, mobile education, newspaper and insurance selling on mobile will be the next big things, in addition to traditional m-commerce (clothes, cosmetics etc) which are lagging a bit (small screens to download pictures, etc).
On the downside, when working with operators, the difficulty met is in the transaction size limit, a real hurdle for air tickets (Treasure Beam has yet to launch their airticket service) and bad debt. With China Mobile introducing mobile wallet applications, some of these restrictions will be lifted. Marketing of all these applications will also be a key success factor, as users are usually unaware of all the m-commerce applications they can use on their phone.
Some numbers: on Taobao, the average mobile transaction size is RMB 100. The number of daily transactions reached 100,000 in 2009 and daily transaction volume reached 1 million RMB (302 Mil RMB transactions for 2009 alone). The number of daily visitors reached 4 million at the end of 2009 (2.5 Mil daily active users over 2009 on average). Taobao Wireless saw a “hockey stick” in user growth in the second half of 2009, with 40% increase usage. TreasureBeam, on their side, claim at least 10 Mil subscribers. They also saw similar growth patterns.