A famous Chinese magazine called My Money, has recently published an article telling its readers how to save money on bank remittance fees by using China's leading third-party payment provider - Alipay.
While usual remittance fees in China amount to around 1% of funds transfered, using Alipay allows bank account holders to save significant sums.
China's m-payment industry is stuck in a rut, with little consumer demand and no comprehensive network of operators, banks, and merchants available that can match the selection, prices, and convenience of online or bricks-and-mortar payment.
Rather than pooling their limited resources together to benefit the industry as a whole, China's mobile payment providers are going at it alone, each aiming for total domination of the market. Many are attempting to offer a wide range of services all at once and are concentrating on expanding their complex partnership networks. While they do continue to make progress in this area, user growth continues to lag behind.
I have noticed more and more politicians are picking up on the potential for alternative payments in helping the poor, with words like "unbanked" and "underbanked" increasingly replacing other euphemisms such as "underprivileged" and "disadvantaged". Recently former US President Bill Clinton and current California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger jointly published an op-ed piece entitled "Beyond Payday Loans" in the Wall Street Journal:
Recently, China Mobile announced that they are going to do the real-name registration for all newly issued SIM cards. This new policy includes prepaid accounts Shenzhouxing and Donggandidai (or M-zone), and is effective from January 2008. This new policy is enforceable at China Mobile service centers, but the problem is that many prepaid SIM cards are sold by independent dealers such as newspaper kiosks, supermarkets, and mobile phone shops, most of whom cannot be bothered to enforce this new policy.
It remains to be seen how China Mobile can ensure all of its newly issued SIM cards are registered under the user's name unless they cut off their dealer distribution network around China. If they do this, however, China Mobile will have to invest in drastically increasing its direct sales network, something that I'm not sure they are willing to do.
According to a new article from BusinessWeek.com titled "Millions of iPhones Go AWOL ", there may be more hacked iPhones out there than analysts first expected - up to 1 million out of the 3.7 total iPhones sold as of end-2007!
As I previously mentioned in a blog post back in November 2007, iPhone demand is strong in China and a quick scour of the grey markets shows that unlocked iPhones remain readily available for sale. Even with the widely-documented non-deal with China Mobile, opportunities remain for Apple to expand their business by selling unlocked iPhones directly to the China market.
According to our friends over at BlogNation China, Apple plans on opening its first Apple Store in Beijing by the summer of 2008. It will be interesting to see then, how consumers will react and how the prices will compare to the current going iPhone street price of $550.
