While mobile top-up has a lot going for it, the fact remains that it has not caught on yet. We see several factors behind this:
While all major MPSPs above offer mobile top-up transactions, few are promoting it. Smartpay and YeePay are the only two that have paid much attention to top-ups, and both of them deal primarily with China Unicom, by far the smaller of China's two mobile operators. UMPay, a joint-venture between China Mobile and bank card network operator China UnionPay (and thus the best positioned of all MPSPs to work with China Mobile), has yet to show much interest in promoting mobile top-up to China Mobile's 225 million prepaid subscribers.
Roaming has been a hot topic in China for the past few months, and just weeks ago the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) and National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) jointly announced that roaming rates would be lowered starting on March 1. The move came about in large part due to increasing consumer complaints about the high fees for cross-province calls.
We at Maverick China Research are partnering with IIR for the Roaming World Congress 2008, which will be held April 21-24 in Vienna. Click here for more information.
According to this article, on the request of an advertisement company, an online apparel sale company's Alipay account was frozen by a court in Shanghai as part of a contract dispute. This is one of the first times a Chinese court has successfully take action on online virtual assets.
After the request was raised, a person in the court left for Alipay's headquarters to freeze the account (with the help of Alipay).
Because users can deposit money in make online payments through an Alipay account, it has some of the characteristics of a bank account. This ruling shows that for legal disputes, Alipay accounts can also be treated as bank accounts and "frozen".
The drop in fixed-line subscribers has slowed down somewhat after a nosedive in December 2007, with China Telecom reporting a net loss of 1.22 million subscribers and China Netcom a total of 765,000.
Mobile top-up allows users to add value to their mobile accounts without having to purchase top-up cards, which are most often found at supermarkets, convenience stores, and newsstands. More than any other product or service currently in development, mobile top-up has all the ingredients to become the driving force behind m-payment adoption in China.
