MobileFocus2008 event - Learning from Asia's mobile market for your future

Benjamin Joffe, CEO +8* and founder Mobile Monday Beijing presented “The invisible media revolution: learning from Asia's mobile futures”

Benjamin Joffe founded http://www.plus8star.com +8* is a cross marketing company focusing on China-Korea-Japan markets.

Benjamin presented mainly views on China, Korea and Japan mobile markets and users.

The World-wide mobile market is 3.3B users, of that

• Asia 40%
• ROW 12%
• North America 8%
• Latin and South America 11%
• Europe 29%

The 3G market is >70% in Korea and Japan. In Japan more than $1B market for mobile music.

The mobile TV market is >30% in Korea and Japan. 70% of all phones are TV enabled.

D2 Communications, a mobile marketing firm says the mobile ads market is $700M, ads are using QR coded ads.

Blyk an ad sponsored UK MVNO operator is e.g. targetting 15-25 year old people, free phone service plus about 200 SMS per month. http://www.blyk.co.uk/

Good examples of money making mobile services in Asia:

Mobile auctions MobaOku (DeNA) in Japan has $7.4B m-commerce in Japan.
http://www.dena.jp/en/services/ecommerce.html#mbok

Mobile books example 2M books sold (of one book) for about 8 Euro apiece. Benjamin also stated, one major reason for good penetration of mobile commerce in Japan is that they introduced a flat fee data plans already back in 2004.

The last example concerns Mobile SNS (social networking). In a sharp contrast to almost everywhere else in the world, in Japan, Korea and China, social networking services are profitable including the mobile version.

Good examples;

The mobile social networking site mbga in Japan has 10M users with communities of games. http://www.mbga.jp/.pc/

The mobile social networking site mixi in Japan http://mixi.jp/ has 10M users

The mobile social networking QQ in China http://qq.com/ has 50M mobile users and 520M USD in revenue with 87% coming from users.

The mobile social networking site cyworld in Korea http://www.cyworld.com/cymain/index.asp has 6M users where 80% of revenue coming from users.

Finally, Asia is getting a mobile lifestyle infrastructure, use of 3G plus flat-fee data means media drives mobile services, devices and indirectly need for infrastructure.

More from this event will come in newer blog posts from Thomas Lidforss International