Enterprise mobility in China: $4.1 billion market in 2014

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: According to a new report from Ovum, the global analyst and consulting company, enterprises in China are beginning to express increasing demand for enterprise mobility for reasons such as higher affordability, more option for customization, and easier deployment.

Chinese companies are still in the early phases of enterprise mobility deployment. “This is evident from the limited types of mobile devices which have been procured and issued to their mobile employees,” explains Jane Wang, Senior Analyst at Ovum.

The China enterprise mobility market is not large compared to leading Asia-Pacific markets, but Ovum forecasts that future growth rate will be fast. “We expect enterprise mobility revenues to steadily grow, exceeding $4.1 billion by 2014,” said Jane Wang, based in Beijing.

Applications will be expanded and upgraded. As 3G and WLAN become more popular in China, and enterprise users recognise the benefits of mobile applications, enterprise users will extend their mobility requirements from the initial usage, such as network construction and push email into mobile OA, mobile ERP and other high end enterprise applications.

“The potential of enterprise mobility in each vertical industry is determined by its level of ICT adoption”, advised Wang. “In China, the vertical industries with higher adoption of ICT are finance, telecommunications, government and manufacturing.”

Among these industries the proportion of enterprise mobility spending is less than 10 percent of their ICT annual budget; Ovum observes that these industries, in varying degrees, have strong potential demand on the enterprise mobility.

For example, the banking industry shows the interests of mobile banking, mobile payments, and there are pilot cases in several banking. Central and local governments in the process of building e-government systems are also raising demand, such as electronic police force to use of PDA and cellular applications. Although the adoption are still small scale and at an early stage, Ovum believes if the enterprise mobility services provider offer a good experience to users at headquarters, enterprises will extend mobility services to their branches in the future.

Also, Ovum expects new verticals to emerge in the short term. Starting in 2009, for example, the Chinese government has been investing to reform the health care industry, and generating IT and communications requirements such as networked medical record systems and mobile applications to manage patient/doctor appointments and other communications. The electric power industry is also trying to set up intelligent grid planning, which will drive the demand of the power industry for machine-to-machine (M2M) mobile applications.

Ovum’s 2009 SME survey results show that SME demand and spending for enterprise mobility is relatively low. Service providers are offering them mobility services such as push email and SMS platforms. However, with the great enterprise number, over 90 percent of the amount of Chinese enterprises, SMEs represent a largely market space with opportunities and potential for high growth.

SMEs expect to expand the share of their telecoms budget devoted to mobility, and many companies expect to use more mobility applications such as mobile IM and mobile multimedia.