Analysis of M-commerce in China

Abstract

With the development of mobile service, more and more M-commerce applications have been adopted in China. The government also encourages this trend, as presented in its policies. In this paper, four major business model of M-commerce will be introduced to analyze the applications in China. These four models are B-B-E (Employee), B-B-M (Machine), B-B-P (Promotion), B-B-C (Consumer). Examples of each model will be presented after the definition of each model. The first model is B-B-E. The first B refers to mobile operator, the second B refers to enterprise or government, the E means employees of the enterprise or government. In this model, a wireless connection is an obvious prerequisite for employees to gain access to their enterprise applications. Wireless connectivity can be enabled through a wide range of technologies, such as smart-phone and PDA using standard mobile data networks (currently China Mobile's GPRS and China Unicorn's CDMAIX), PC data cards etc. Once connected, enterprise employees can access the internet, the company intranet or take advantage of mobile data solutions that may be integrated with their enterprise systems. For B-B-E model, the most famous application in China is in the government sector, originally from Beijing East District Government. With the B-B-E solution, government staffs with mobile device support were sent to the street to report problem and interact with citizens, which significantly improve the efficiency. The solution is based on two management centers, connecting with nearly 400 municipal asset management staffs. With GIS system, the district area will be divided into 100m*100 m square grid with specified numbered municipal assets. The municipal asset management staffs will use the mobile device (also has GPS function) to go around the grids to report, interact with citizens, and solve the asset problems.