China Market Update

I just returned from China and Taiwan. While Taiwan has been hit hard by a 50% drop in exports, China continues to hum along (excluding the Southern part which has been hit hard by a large drop in exports). China is currently rolling out the largest mobile broadband network in the world, and in record time. China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom are also racing to roll out new 3G networks with next generation video services. For China Unicom, this will involve IVVR as well as ringback tones. It is interesting to note that IVVR is one of the first applications that CU will roll out. With such a large and dispersed population, CU plans to use multimedia services via its IVVR offering to bring services “from the few to the many.”