Mobile Payment Magazine

Chinese Mobile Payment Company B.Shark Expands to Thailand Market

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B.Shark, a Chinese company offering worldwide mobile payment solutions, is expanding its market to Thailand. The company’s mobile payment API covers the three major operators in Thailand: AIS, DTAC and TrueMove.

The number of mobile subscribers in Thailand exceeds 70 million, which is greater than the population–so each subscriber has more than one mobile phone on average.

According to the latest figures,the average revenue per user (ARPU) for Thailand operators has a fairly wide range. DTAC, which focuses on high-level business subscribers, has the highest ARPU at 286 THB, followed by AIS at 232 THB, and TrueMove at 112 THB. Most subscribers in Thailand will charge 50 THB each time, and the lowest value recharge card is 20 THB.

In terms of value-added services, the most popular content is music, especially the local music created by Thailand’s popular music singers. The second most popular content is mobile wallpaper. Smart phone owners are frequent users of social network applications. When it comes to games, Texas Poker is one of the most popular.

Chinese mobile payment solution provider, B.Shark, has already launched its global mobile payment API, supporting China-Phone OS, Android OS and also web-based computer social games. The API covers the three mobile operators in Thailand. All mobile game developers and mobile phone producers are free to download the API and integrate with their games or application.

Source: B.shark

Chinese Company B.Shark to Extend Mobile Payment Offering to Physical Goods

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Years ago, operator billing was only applied for value-added services such as ringtones, ring back tones, wallpaper, news, music, and the like. Later it was applied to other fields such as mobile games, game tools and the mobile application market. Now, operator billing is extending to more and more fields, including physical goods payments. B.Shark, a Chinese company offering worldwide mobile payment solutions, now plans to extend its offerings to physical goods payment.

Operators are concerned about being a communication/data channel only, so some operators are reducing operator revenue share, especially reducing their own revenue share when it comes to physical goods payments. That is to say, when customers pay for physical goods via operator billing, merchants will receive a higher revenue share than for virtual goods. This strategy will increase the competitive power of operators when competing with banks.

“B.Shark will launch a physical goods payment solution with the cooperation of an overseas e-commerce platform,” according to the marketing director of B.Shark.

Other mobile payment companies, such as Paypal, Boku and Zong, are also planning to cooperate with e-commerce platforms in the field of physical goods payments.

Source: B.Shark

B.Shark Holds Forum on Who Will Play a Leading Roll in Mobile Payments

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B.Shark, a Chinese company offering worldwide mobile payment solutions, recently collaborated with SPforum, the largest microblog dedicated to the Mobile Internet industry in China, to hold a forum about who will play the leading role in worldwide mobile payments. The discussion was lively, and experts from Paypal and Alipay participated, among others.

Some highlights from the forum include:

  • “Telecom Operators, Financial Companies (such as Banks) and third-party payment companies (such as Alipay, Boku, Zong) are playing important roles in mobile payment,” said Mr. Peng, an expert from Paypal.
  • Operators have huge numbers of mobile subscribers and have a good understanding of  the behavior of mobile subscribers; and operators’ customer care centers can also be the customer service centers for mobile payment transactions.
  • The advantage of financial companies is that banks have the best understanding of customers’ payment behavior, and bank branches also can be the place to educate customers about how to use mobile payments.
  • Third-party payment companies, such as Alipay, Boku, Zong, Obopay and Square are playing a more and more important role in mobile payments. “Third-party payment companies always try to improve service for customers and integrate resource from different organizations in the payment value-chain; this is the advantage of third-party payment companies,” said Mr.Ding, an expert from Alipay.

In the area of global payments, mobile payment can be divided into three areas geographically. “In Asian countries, especially Japan and South Korea, with the strong support from operators, a large quantity of applications and services based on NFC drive NFC payment forward; In Africa, only around 20%-30% of adults have bank accounts, mobile payment via telecom networks are successful, M-Pesa in Kenya is an example; In America and Europe, the redit card industry is matured, however operators also try to play a role. For example, Everything Everywhere, O2 and Vodafone, formed a joint venture to accelerate the uptake of mobile commerce in the U.K, and AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon also formed a joint venture mobile company named Isis utilizing near-field communication (NFC) technology in the U.S.A,” said ZhongYuan, Zhang, COO of B.Shark. “The fact that eBay bought Zong for $240 million in cash, shows the value of third-party mobile payments focused on operator billing.”

The mobile payment chain is very long. It includes telecom operators, banks, third-party mobile payment companies, mobile phone producers, etc. When all the parties cooperate, the mobile payment will move faster and more smoothly.

Payment Methods for Chinese Social Networking Service (SNS) Games Exported to Southeast Asian Market

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As Chinese game developers rush to explore the overseas market, game operation as well as in-game payment systems have become a hot topic for game developers.

Chinese game developers are running their games in the overseas markets in a number of ways: First, through massive global social networks, such as Facebook;  other developers prefer to run the games on their own platforms, like Elex-tech; and still others distribute their games via local operators. Game developers who choose the last option are free from worrying about game operating and recharging systems as the agent takes care of that; but if they choose the first option, especially publishing games on Facebook, they need to operate the game on their own and choose their own payment methods.

Regardless of the new Facebook payment policies,  there are three payment methods on Facebook:

  • Facebook credit and PayPal that binds with users’ debit or credit cards;
  • Local game recharging cards;
  • Mobile billing

Facebook credit and PayPal is popular in European countries but rarely in Southeast Asia, as local users are not accusto med to using credit cards.

Compared with PayPal, the use of game recharging cards is more widespread. Game recharging cards such as MOL are popular in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, but rarely in Southeast Asia.

As for mobile billing, it is not restricted by sales outlets and it fits the users’ need of paying anytime and anywhere. People choose mobile billing mostly because of its lower risks and ease of use, so it is an important payment method. For some small game developers, it would be difficult for them to go directly to the operators, so a preferrable solution may be to select a mobile billing solution provider that can supply them with customized service, such as provided by B.Shark, Boku and Zong.

In conclusion, not one of the payment solutions is perfect; they are complementary with each other, and Social Networking Service (SNS) game developers should optimize their payment system in order to maximum their income.

Source: B.Shark

B.Shark Mobile Payment API Drives Up the China Phone Market

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Just one month after launching the B.Shark mobile payment API, hundreds of mobile application developers and manufacturers have started the integration work, and shipped out the mobiles and have started generating income. Particularly the South East Asian market is showing a sharp increase at the beginning of July.

Most of the mobile manufactures integrated with B.Shark’s mobile payment API sell their mobiles to Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam in South-east Asia, to Brazil and Chile in South America, and to Nigeria and Ghana in Africa.

“It was very difficult for the mobile manufacturers to make any revenue on the pre-load mobile content before, because we do not have a connection with the operators and other service providers’ solutions cannot work on our mobile OS,” said a manager from the value added service department from one of the biggest manufacturers of China phones.
”Mobile users can now enjoy better and constant updated mobile content through GPRS networks, and with the B.Shark API, we can collect the revenue from the pre-loaded content, which would increase brand loyalty and the competitiveness of the manufacturers. With this kind of fierce competition in the industry, this extra income means a lot to us,” he added

The up-to-date data shows that hundreds of mobile manufactures have downloaded the B.Shark mobile payment API. With this API, they will be able to explore more areas in the overseas mobile market, and push the China phone market forward.

Source: B.Shark

Chinese Mobile Game Developers Discuss Expansion to Overseas Markets

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Recently the SPforum Blog, the largest microblog dedicated to the Mobile Internet industry in China, held a forum with topics on how Chinese game developers can expand to overseas markets. The discussion was lively, and more than 100 top Chinese game developers participated.

Some highlights from the forum include:

  • Participants agreed that it is high time for the Chinese game developers to go global. As more opportunities have become available. Many agreed that Chinese developers should be more open and look beyond China to overseas markets. “We will be changed if we cannot change ourselves first,” said Zhishang Wang, CEO of SPforum Microblog.
  • Chinese developers should develop multi-language games for smart phones while developing single-language games for feature phones (non-smart phones). “It is better to develop games in several language versions at the same time since the smart phone AppStore is more often on a global scale,” said Gang Wu, CEO of WiSTONE Entertainment, a famous mobile game developer in China.
  • Games for smart phones can be distributed to Europe, Asia, and Latin America, while games for feature phones should be distributed to countries where Chinese feature phones are exported mostly, such as Vietnam, Thailand, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria, etc.
  • Games for Android can be distributed through third party Android Market. With China, for example, EOE and 1Mobile would be the most popular. These markets already have a large number of users in overseas markets. Games for feature phones can be distributed through the Sky-Mobi Platform, which is the largest Chinese AppStore in feature phones covering users in over 80 countries.
  • Game developers should adopt several payment solutions for its games and users will choose the best solution by themselves. The suggested payment solutions are Boku, Zong, Paypal, B.Shark, etc. B.Shark is the leading mobile payment solution provider in China that have premium short codes in 116 countries, covering 300+ operators, and B.Shark can offer faster after-sales service for Chinese game developers comparing with foreign payment solution providers.

“Chinese game developers should take advantage of Chinese resources when expanding to overseas market, such as quantity of Phone producers in China and those Chinese AppStore solution providers who focus on overseas markets,” said Zhongyuan Zhang, COO of B.Shark.

Source: B.Shark

 

Chinese Mobile Payment Company B.Shark Launches Payment API for Tablets

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With more than 300 partners registered in the first week after B.Shark launched its mobile payment API, B.Shark continued to introduce the payment API for tablets. With the B.Shark’s BSpay API, tablet manufacturers will be able to charge consumers from other countries, which would be a new option to increase tablet manufacturer revenue.

The latest IDC report shows that the worldwide shipment of tablets has reached 18 million in 2010. Market research Company IMS expects a growth of 242% and 58 million shipments for tablets in 2011. All of this shows the rapid increase of popularity for tablets– and the Android driven tablets are  taking up the market share dramatically. Analyst Toni Sacconaghi has predicted that the shipment of tablets worldwide will reach 215 million units by 2015. He believes that 15% of the tablet sales are derived from consumers from the PC market; consequently, between 2010 and 2015 the growth rate of PC sales should decline by 2%. [Read more…]