Mobile commerce market scale hits 64 billion RMB in China

China's mobile Internet users totaled 288 million by the end of last year, according to statistics released by Enfodesk yesterday, an increase of 18.5 percent at the chain base ratio, and the market size of mobile phone commerce — known as M-commerce — hit 64 million RMB, up 64.2 percent compared to the same period of the last year.

Last year, 34 billion yuan in profits were made from service charges, which accounts more than half of the overall market.

WiFi music, cell phone games and online reading are on the rise within the mobile entertainment business. And there is a preference among Chinese cartoon fans for mobile phones instead of laptop terminals. In Japan, cell-phone cartoons dominate nearly 90 percent of the digital publishing.

Enfodesk's analyst interpreted from the stats that there is diversification occurring in three areas: consumer structure, terminal categories and applications. Efforts by the manufacturers, together with the diversifications have spurred the drastic growth of the market in China last year. By 2012, it is estimated that the number of mobile Internet users will reach 600 million, surpassing the number of land line users.

This year, M-commerce fever continued during the first month of 2011. A number of factors, such as the shift in leadership at Google, Groupon's potential entry into China, MSN's focus shift toward the SNS and downsizing at Yahoo!, all seem to show that M-commerce is heating up.

By Li Yancheng, People's Daily Online