Chinese dotcoms look to multimedia messaging services for profit growth  
中国网络企业瞄准多媒体短信服务刺激利润增长

Sun Mar 7, 1:37 PM ET  Add Technology - AFP to My Yahoo!
 

(中文导读)
中国知名的网络企业认为，多媒体短信服务将成为他们保持利润增长的聚宝盆，为此在这一领域投入了更多的资金刺激发展。与仅仅允许文本传输的一般短信不同，多媒体短信使得用户可以传输彩色照片、动画、录音以及视频内容。

BEIJING (AFP) - China's top dotcoms believe multimedia messaging services (MMS) will become a gold mine sustaining their profit growth, and have earmarked large sums for aggressive development, state media said. 

Sohu.com, one of China's three large Nasdaq-listed portals, plans "huge investment" this year in a bid to outpace its two major rivals Sina.com and Netease.com in tapping the market, Xinhua news agency said.

"The peak season for short text messages is over," Sohu's CEO Charles Zhang said according to Xinhua. "MMS based on (2.5-generation) technology will herald explosive growth in 2004."

Unlike short messaging services (SMS), which allow transmissions of written text only, MMS enables users to send color pictures, animation, recorded sound and video.

At the end of last year, eight million Chinese residents subscribed to MMS, and experts believe MMS for mobile subscribers will expand to an industry worth 22 billion dollars by 2008, according to Xinhua.

Sina has also said it would try to become a major player in the expanding MMS business, even though it currently only has "thousands" of MMS users, the agency reported.

"Compared with Sina's 18 million SMS subscribers, the number of ... MMS users is still very small," said Sina's CEO Wang Yan. "Yet the MMS market possesses enormous business opportunities."

"Hundreds of billions of short multimedia messages will have been sent by 2005, which will have generated a revenue no less than that of SMS."

The future of the industry hinges on how fast the government sets up the needed infrastructure.

China has been pushing the development of the third-generation technology, which allows transmission of voice, data and video, and high speed wireless Internet access 40 times faster than second-generation systems, Xinhua said.

"The rising MMS business ushers in a new wireless Internet era," said an industry expert." It doesn't simply mean a reordering of Internet portals. It will redefine themarket."