Forbes shared their idea of which are the top 25 cities in China in terms of commerce, innovation, operation cost and developed tourism.

1. Shanghai appeared for 4 times in the top 3 as the best commercial city, the best innovative city, city with highest operation cost and city with most developed tourism.
2. First tier cities, Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, ranked high in the top 25 best commercial cities and top 50 best innovative cities. Sadly, doing business in such big cities also means extremely high operation cost
3. Judged from the performance of those cities in Yangtze River Delta, we can see the great potential innovation capability in this area

CPT is short for Cost Per Time, a comparatively fixed charging model. Most websites or blogs will charge for a certain sum of money per month, which assures their stable advertisement income. But the advertising results are quite difficult to measure. Maybe that’s why its distribution decreases year after year.

CPC is short for Cost Per Click or Cost Per Thousand Click-Through, which is based on the number of clicks. It is mainly used by Google AdSence for Content and Baidu Promotion. With more attention to search ads, its distribution increased generally and even account for 51.9% in 2012.

CPA is short for Cost Per Acquisition and it charge on the base of actual results.

CPS is for Cost Per Sale, mostly used by shopping or guide sites.

CPM is for Cost Per Thousand Impression. Regardless of the outcome, advertisers have to pay as long as the ads are shown.

1. Unlike China, American and Japanese consumers mainly use credit cards for payment
2. Compared with the USA and Japan, Chinese consumers are far keener to e-commerce transactions
3. Hot categories of these three countries include books, clothes and ornaments
4. Transnational e-commerce has great potencial in the long run

Recently, Alibaba Group announced that by Nov 30 in 2012, total Taobao sales (including Tmall and Taobao.com) exceeded 1 trillion yuan (USD160 Billion).

Great Potential of Domestic Consumption

During last month’ Bachelor’s Day Promotion, Taobao accomplished sales of 19.1 billion yuan (USD3.07 billion) in only one day. Not only did this figure reflected the strong consumer demand, but also represented the great growth of consumption, mostly generated from third- or fourth-tier cities.

Clearly, the consumption growth of third- or fourth-tier cities, which was 60%, was much higher than that of first- and second-tier cities. Meanwhile, enterprises in Yangtze Delta and Pearl River Delta, who previously hindered by limited exports, now have ushered in new opportunities following the trend of e-commerce.

E-commerce: Emerging Economies’ Past and Present Life

Behind this 1-trillion-yuan transaction, China netizens should see the enormous change in the environment of e-commerce. When firstly appeared, some people criticized that Chinese e-commerce could not pull down the three “mountains” of credit, logistic and payment.

Until now, China internet users have credit evaluation systems to insure the internet trading safety, such like Taobao’s transparent one whose transaction figures and credit records are available to consumers. They have convenient online payment system such like Alipay. They also have complete logistic system to support the incredible development of e-commerce.

Alibaba’s exploration represents the growth of Chinese e-commerce. In 1999, Alibaba was founded in Hangzhou. Many trading enterprises began to take in oversea orders through this channel. Taobao.com was first established in 2003, accomplishing only 22.71 million yuan (USD3.64 million). And the transaction rose to 1 billion (USD160 million) in the next year.

We shall not ignore the key event in 2003, the setup of credit evaluation system. Since then, Taobao dropped into the flourishing growth with the transaction rising from 8 billion yuan (USD1.284 billion) in 2005 to 1 trillion yuan in 2012. At the same time, the whole transaction on the Internet reached 2 trillion yuan.

Driven by new consumption mode in Internet environment, e-commerce has become the dominant business model. With strong data processing and promising prospect, e-commerce will be the major force to deliver profound changes for retailing industry and boost domestic spending.

Take logistics industry as an example. By 2011, daily amount of parcels of Taobao.com and Taobao Mall (Tmall’s predecessor) surpassed 8 million (USD1.284 million), accounting for 60% of the whole. In H1 2012, this number increased sharply to 12 million and even soared to 72 million on Bachelor’s Day. There were 64,000 branch networks and more than 700,000 people employed in 2011. Chinese logistics market is worth 70 billion yuan (USD11.24 billion), the third highest in the world.

The Future of This Emerging Economies

A new economy represented by e-commerce is incredibly changing the development pattern of Chinese economy.

Jack Ma, the president of Alibaba Group, said that,” we are very lucky to live in this era of the Internet and witness the surprises and changes that the Internet and e-commerce bring to us. Without exaggeration, 1 trillion yuan is a start, and we are ready to target 10 trillion yuan in the future. There will be 10 million small but hopeful enterprises in China and they will serve for 1 billion consumers in the world.”

“I don’t think the essence of e-commerce is so-called virtual economy. Instead, this is the actually emerging economies, the perfect combination of Internet technology and traditional real economy. It can integrate available resources efficiently, lower the operation cost of enterprises and promote the competitive strengths of SMEs. Millions of e-retailers and consumers are reshaping the economy of China.”

According to data from the Office for National Statistics, retail sales of consumer goods in the whole country totaled 18.39 trillion yuan and 1 trillion yuan accounted for 5.4%. Obviously, e-commerce has already become a huge emerging economies and will experience rapid growth for a long time to come.

This is just the start.

The latest statistics from iResearch showed that China online video market reached 2.66 billion uuan (USD430 million) in Q3 2012, with the QoQ growth of 16.2% and YoY growth of 37.2%.

As the major part of online video revenue sources, the online video advertising market is 2.01 billion yuan (USD320 million) in Q3, with the QoQ growth of 21.6% and YoY growth of 49.7%. Influenced by the overall economic conditions, the growth rate of online marketing industry is slowing down.

Also, under the big picture of industry consolidation, the \video broadcasting license payment for TV series dropped in Q3.

The total number of China Internet users as well as mobile internet user is experiencing steady growth ever since 2008. The total number of China mobile Internet users is close to 400 million by the end of the first half in 2012.

Compared with September, total visits to Baidu increased and its market share by visits went up to 61%, keeping its safe lead in this field. Moreover, Bing is experiencing an obvious growth ever since its strategy adjustment.

Qihoo’s 360 search engine is now the second most visited search engine in China after Baidu.

CNNIC reported that nearly 80% of Chinese netizens pay close attention to commercial information on social networking sites. In September, the average visits per user on a single day is 2.2 times, 11 minutes. 

More than 40% of netizens are interested in items shared by their friends. Almost 40% of netizens will regard friends’ comments as references to help with their own shopping decisions. In addition, 37.2% of netizens will share their favorite items, brands and stores on SNS. More than 25% of them would complain on SNS if they had bad shopping experience.

Only 22.1% will not participate in any actions mentioned above. That is to say, approximately 80% of them keep an eye on commercial activities or commodity information on SNS, from which we can see SNS influence in online shopping.

Following the global trend of smart TVs’ popularity, 40% of the TVs that shipped in China in Q2 were web-enabled. According to NPD’s October 2012 DisplaySearch “Quarterly Smart TV Shipment and Forecast Report”, “this was an increase from 26% of televisions shipped in Q2 2011”.

This increase is quite reasonable. Firstly, most TV users are spoiled netizens and are very tired of TV shows’ schedule. Secondly, online content are ready to meet the need of smart TV users. It seems that UGC could be transferred from online videos to TV series.

In 2012, the number of China online shopping users reached 220 million, far exceeding 150 million in the U.S according to eMarketer. It is estimated that there will be 423.4 million internet users who make at least one purchase in 2016.

In 2011, China B2C e-commerce market (including online retailing and travel booking) was USD55.37 billion, and the growth was 103.7% compared with that in 2010. In 2012, the total transactions will reach USD107.5 billion, exceeding that of 2011 by 94.1%.

China is the second largest B2C e-commerce market in Asia, only second to Japan. China will likely surpass Japan and replace UK to be the second in the world.

These statistics represent both challenges and opportunities for foreign brands. China has great potential in online consumptions. Local enterprises are taking control of market shares in most online channels like search engines and social media, which foreign brands are not so familiar with. Also, the problem of fake and inferior products, price wars and rising supply chain cost could make new entries more difficult.

According to EnfoDesk, the total transaction of China online payment market reached 976.4 billion Yuan (USD156.4 bilion) in the third quarter. The QoQ growth was 13.1% and the YoY growth was 73%.

Influenced by National Day holidays and other business trips, online payment transaction for travel booking experienced obvious increase. And some emerging markets like retailing, cross-border trading also kept mushrooming.

Here are 3 trends in third-party online payment industry:

1. Quick payment services develop rapidly. Following the steps of Alipay and Unionpay, payment enterprises like Tenpay, 99Bill and Chinapnr accelerate their development into quick payment services.
2. Increased innovation in mobile payment. In Q3, Alipay established some mobile payment products based on the application of QR code and LBS. Tenpay cooperated with weixin to release Micro-life Payment Services, which may be a helpful strategic step for the process of O2O.
3. Most payment enterprises expand into their offline POS region. Take Chinapnr as an example. It has founded branches for POS services in more than 30 cities, speeding up its overall arrangement to compete in the POS services market via agencies.

In Sep 2012, Tmall was catching up with 360buy and the gap was gradually reduced. Meanwhile, Suning slipped one spot to the fourth and Vancl even dropped off the top 10.

With the coming “11.11”, so-called Bachelor’s Day, we can expect to see fierce competition among China B2C online retailers.

The Evening Post reported, free music download in China is to be ended on Dec 31. Most online music platforms like Baidu Music, QQ Music, Duomi, Kugou are going to charge for music download services. However, this is a special thing for high-quality copyrighted music download while the online streaming is still free.

 Is it an agreement in the industry?

Shi Jianping, president of Duomi Music, admitted that Baidu, QQ Music, Duomi, Kugou and Kuwo had reached an agreement to charge at download services. These 5 platforms occupied more than 95% market share in China. Other websites are likely to join this charge army in the near future. And more and more record companies are negotiating relative charging issues.

As for the timing, it is not compulsory since each platform could adjust it according to the situation. Due to the unfinished contracts, Baidu music will charge download next April.

How can online music be charged?

Top three record companies, Warner, Sony and Global, provided a list of guiding prices, including minimum monthly fees for downloads. But most music websites prefer to differentiate their prices, of course based on some specific principles. At present, seldom websites will reveal their charge policies. Basically, the price will be 1 yuan for each song or 10 yuan to 20 yuan for a month.

Also, charges are only for high-quality copyrighted music download while the online auditioning is still free. That is to say, only when users downloaded music whose formats are APE, FLAC or something else, will they be charged. QQ Music has established a policy called “VIP Download”. Users will be only charged 10 yuan per month to enjoy high-quality music.

Based on the principle of guarantee and division, all profit will be divided between music platforms and record companies

What are the comments at all sides?

Certainly, record companies feel thrilled with this change. They used to losing hope for online channels and they could not see any respect for their copyright before. But this trend of charging may emerge new look for the record industry. In the eyes of website owners, charging used to be extremely hard under the big picture of pirate copies and free music services. However, action should be taken.

Image source: Sohu.com

According to Trade and Industry information on Oct 29 2012, 360Buy had completed the acquisition of Chinabank Payment. Meanwhile, 360buy is investing in the technology development to build its own online payment platform.

The Trade and Industry information demonstrated that the legal representative of Chinabank Payment (Beijing) Technology Co., has been transferred to Liu Qiangdong, the CEO of 360buy. Previously, the legal representative was Zhao Guodong.

A reliable source disclosed that, 360buy negotiated the acquisition with several payment companies and decided to choose Chinabank Payment, who provides with comparatively lower prices but has greater potential. The business matchmaking is ongoing and Zhao appears in the executive meetings of 360buy.

According to analysis from industry insiders, there are two major reasons for 360Buy to set foot in the field of online payment. Firstly, it will add weight for its IPO to acquire another company. Secondly, this is a strategic step to integrate its industry chain, which will be a trend in the near future. Beforehand, 360Buy had to settle accounts with buyers via other third-party online payment gateway, which costs a lot and may result in data disclosure. After the acquisition, 360buy can handle the cash flow and even provide petty loans for SMEs.

According to the latest statistics from iResearch, the transaction scale of China online payment reached 776 billion yuan (USD 124 billion) in Q1 2012, with the YoY growth of 112.6% and the QoQ growth of 1.2%.

Though growing speed slipped down a bit, online payment services keep high growth in 2012

The first quarter was an off season for online shopping and travel booking industry, whose decrease in transaction scale directly affects online payment industry. In Q1 2012, the total transaction scale of e-commerce market is 1.75 trillion yuan (USD 280 billion), showing an increase of 25.8% compared with last year and a decline of 4.2 on a sequential base. The transaction scales of online shopping and travel booking declined for 0.8% and 2.1% respectively compared with last quarter.

While traditional industries bring new sources of growth for online payment services, some online payment enterprises extend their services into industries like steel, logistic, capital funds and education. Except for payment settlement services, they will even provide specific industry solutions.

The competitive landscape of online payment was relatively stable

Based on the market share distribution, the competitive landscape of online payment was relatively stable with Alipay keeping its safe lead in Q1 2012. It seems that these businesses had their footing and unique advantages in this industry.

This chart above shows the top 18 concerns of Chinese people. 60% of interviewees think that rising prices is a serious problem in their daily lives; 45% are worrying about the negative influence of corrupt officials, followed by the concern of the wealth gap. Many people hold the opinion that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

Source: news.163.com

People have got used to card purchasing

According to the research from CCFA, the proportion of credit card purchasing is increasing with the year-on-year growth of 30%. The domestic card spending has surpassed 16 trillion yuan (USD2.56 billion), accounting for 40% of total retail sales of consumer goods.

Card charges are divided up by 3 parties

Businesses have to bear the card charges

By regulation, businesses have to bear all card charges with the standard rates ranging from 0.5% to 4%. The costly fees result in the situation that some businesses don’t accept payments by credit cards.

Commercial banks don’t think the card charge is high in China

Some banking industry insider stressed that our domestic average card changes are not so high compared with other card changes in the world. Standing in the position of banks, they will not welcome the policies on cutting the card charges.

Data source: Beijing Times, Xinhua Report

Sina recently launched a section on Weibo called micro-tasks, which could be useful to marketers. There is no doubt that this is an important step for the commercialized process of Sina weibo.

What is Sina Weibo Micro-task?

Micro-task, or Weirenwu in Chinese pinyin, is the official platform for posting and accepting Weibo tasks. At present, this section is visible only to enterprise users. Enterprises users can start this function by entering this section. Then they can create tasks and choose some specific weibo accounts to post or repost ad campaigns. As for the non-enterprise users, in order to being part of this, they have to apply for enterprise certification or contact customer servicers.

Before establishing a task, the enterprise users need to top up their account via a new online payment tool by Sina, Xinfutong. Only when there is enough sums in the account can the task be created; and, the minimum to top up is 5,000 yuan (USD 800). Texts, pictures, URLs and time settings are also needed.

Who receive micro-tasks?

And how does this platform choose the listed accounts to accept tasks? Depending on the total number of fans, activity of fans, quality of weibo post and some other parameters that Sina use to evaluate, each account on this platform will be graded. And their scores have significant meaning to users’ choice.

The qualified rating from low to high is: one star, two-star, three-star, four-star, five-star, six-star and diamond. Except for the grades, micro-task platform will calculate advising price for each account.

What are the advantages of using the task platform?

According to the official, Sina micro-task could provide more benefits for marketers than grassroots weibo accounts. It has great advantages in credibility and transaction protections.

For enterprise users, micro-task could provide most suitable data supports to guide and help with the promotions. For task receivers, all contents on this platform had been audited, so no account will be cracked down because of spamming.

Online Discussion Regarding Micro-tasks

Micro-task platform aroused a lot of concerns since its release.

Someone said there was no need for such kind of weibo marketing platform. Most weibo marketing accounts have their own system to attract business, plan campaigns, and charge by type of content. With more than 2 years’ operation, they have their own target clients. In addition, pricing between marketers and weibo account owners could be more flexible without intervention of third-parties.

Someone doubted the public credibility and transparency of this platform. What are the measures of account grades? It is very hard to persuade the public without more details. More openness in marketing accounts may be counterproductive in promoting sales. People are always disgusted at obvious advertising. By listing them on this platform, marketing accounts are likely to lose the trust from their fans.

What do you think?

According to eMarketer, global digital ad spending will reach $105.02 billion in 2012, among which spend on mobile will be $660 million.

Owing to the rapidly developing internet and mobile market, the digital ad spending in Asia-Pacific region is also experiencing rapid growth and will surpass that of North America in 2014. Estimation demonstrates that the mobile ad spending of this region will reach $2.56 billion in 2012.

Total number of mobile users in China will exceed 1 billion in 2014, accounting for almost half of 2.15 billion mobile users in Asia-Pacific region. No wonder china will become the second largest digital ad market in 2014.

The market scale of weibo will be about 500 million yuan (USD79.82 million) in 2012, among which ads and games represent 75.6% and 21.9% respectively, according to iResearch.

During the second quarter reports, Sina weibo announced its revenue in advertising, accounting for USD 10 million. At this moment, all players are searching for better business model to fit their own characteristics.

Based on the survey data from Phase II Cross-media Research in Feb 2012, online video ads have beaten the television ads by more than 20% in user acceptance.

Online video ads have stronger impact than TV ads

With lower repetition rate and more attractive formats, online video ads are more acceptable than TV ads as the guide of users’ video consumption. Online video ads play 10 to 45 seconds  while TV ads last up to 20 minutes. The duration matters a lot since people will be bored if forced to accept too much advertisement.

Also, audience have higher trust for online video ads. One reason is that online video operators have gained high recognition among netizens. The other one is because of the influence of some big brands, who have taken the lead in digital marketing.

Video subscribers have higher tolerance for ads

In order to watch the free online videos, users keep adjusting their tolerance for ads. The longer the video last, the more ads users accept. For example, people can accept ads playing ads for 2.4 times for a 40-minute online video.

According to the data provided by iResearch this July, here comes the list of China’s top 20 internet companies by total reached users in the first half of 2012. The research was based on long-term monitoring for 400,000 network behavior samples.

According to GlobalWebIndex, emerging internet markets dominate growth numbers for the big name social services and the top five markets for owning and being active on social profiles are Indonesia, China, South Korea, Philippines and Russia.

The same study reported 35.5 million active Twitter users (those who used or contributed to the platform at least once a month using any device) in China.

Baidu Captcha is another strong tool for brand marketing, suitable for online campaign like brand communication, new launches. It uses discernible materials to replace previous twisty letters or characters.

Only when users enter the specific information in the picture or ad words correctly, can they finish the authentication. The process of expression, recognizing, memorizing and repeatedly entering the specified terms strengthens the brand image in users’ mind.

Solve Media partnered with comScore to do some studies on the effectiveness of  interactive captcha ads and the results showed significant lifts in brand awareness, especially in the the CPG category.

Baidu Union has more than 600,000 content publishers, many of them have great demand for this type of advertising. You can contact your Baidu representative or send email to: yanzhengma@baidu.com

The latest data from eMarketer on Sep 28 revealed that the emerging online travel markets of BRIC countries – China, India, Russia and Brazil – had become the ones with the fastest growth in the world.

China’s online travel sales reach $24.77 billion in 2011. It will surge to $32.51 billion in 2012. 

According to the estimation in the report, filling out the top 5 fastest growth in online travel sales from 2011 to 2016 were the populous fast-growing BRIC countries, along with Korea. India has the highest CAGR (compound average growth rate), which is 30.6% while Korea is the second with the CAGR of 19.8%. The CAGRs of Brazil, China and Russia are 18.2%, 14.1% and 9.8%.

The report also anticipated that China’s online travel sales will reach $48 billion in 2016, which is much higher than that of the other three in BRICs. Based on the analysis, though the entire growth of India’s e-commerce is quite slow, the online travel is the exception since it contributes more than 75% to the e-commerce sales.

In the near future, we will see how the fastest developing economies drive the engine of online travel sales.

If you are observing an increase in mobile traffic with high bounce rate, you probably should consider designing a mobile site (if your site is not based on responsive design). If you don’t have a budget for that, you can use this tool from Baidu called Baidu Site App.

According to Tencent News, Baidu Site App Platform is the 1^st online web app builder in China, officially launched on Sep 3. It can provide website developers with integrated services such as webapp delivery, net flow and user importing.

There had been 10,041 registered users, 8,919 submitted portals and 843 of them were rated as good three weeks since its launch.

The five main features of Baidu Site App are:

• Provides multiple sets of templates
• Auto-sync of content
• Helps mobile search ranking
• Supports Baidu Analytic
• Free for ever

Users can register and log in on Baidu Site App Platform. Enter the URL of selected websites, choose Web App templates, and modify specific functions. After deploying domain name, users should submit for official approvement. Once passed, the web app will be online on the mobile internet.

For developers, the advantage of Site App is gradually appearing. As an online builder of mobile web app, Site App can easily turn PC portals into mobile web app. Meanwhile, with the help of Baidu Analytic, intelligent operation can be easily realized. Also, there will be more inputs of net flow and users from Baidu mobile search engine and other means. For example, websites, which are turned into Web App, will have better expression on mobile. This will help the website get higher ranking on results page.

As for users, the transformation of Site App will help them save time and resources. Users have to search, download and install Native app before really using it, which is quite inconvenient. Not to mention how much memory capacity it will occupy. But if native app transforms into web app via Site App Platform, users can get access to a variety of apps without downloading.

We will not deny it is native app that facilitates the explosion of mobile internet but it has its  inevitable limitation. In contrast, web app will not be limited by relative hardware and software vendors while maximize the net profit of developers. We can easily anticipate its leading role in the near future.

Recently, Baidu Team published a brand new analytics product called Baidu Jingsuan. It is a data-drived platform offering precise assessment of online ads for advertisers. With more comprehensive data analysis, it claims it could increase the ROI if taking full advantage of it.

Let’s take a closer look of its fantastic advantages:

In this report, we will take a closer insight of China social media sharing from 3 perspectives: website sharing analysis, communication platform analysis and user analysis.

PART1 Website Sharing Analysis

• 71% of sharing took place on search engine, SNS, entertainment, games, online videos.
• Sharing amount on websites presents the long-tailed distribution
• Contents of fashion, SNS and music have strong ability of network communication

PART2 Communication Platform Analysis

• SNS, weibo, online communities are main social platforms for sharing. Qzone and Sina Weibo take the leading role.
• SNS has more sharing amount and return traffic while weibo has broader reach

PART3 User Analysis

• Sharing behavior begins at 8 am and reach the summit at 11 am
• Male users are more likely to share. Most of users are among the age group of 14 to 28
• Most sharing users have bachelor degree and above, accounting for 55%
• Geographical distribution: 1/3 users are from Eastern China

Data Source: Baidu.com Inc

Shen Xiangyang, Microsoft’s Senior Vice President, Director of Search Engine, disclosed Bing Search’s strategy in China recently.

He said, in order to acquire the 5% high value English search queries, Bing will implement differential competitive strategy in the short run. The core is to provide users with better English search services, including translation and online dictionary.

Though mobile searches still have some limitations compared with that on PC, no one will ignore the potential of it considering the high growth of mobile internet’s development. Shen also points out that Microsoft regard mobile search as the key point for Bing to hit the search market.

Currently, Bing Chinese Search launches a new version, adding some functions like dynamic home page. As for the wireless field, it supplies Window phone with some services like one-touch search.

Instead of giving comments for the 3B War between Baidu and 360, Shen shared Bing’s development in China and the U.S. “In America, Bing has deep cooperation with leading SNS platforms, Facebook and Twitter. Users can directly use Bing once log in on Facebook. Bing is the only search engine cooperated with Twitter.”

Recently, Aliyun and Acer cancelled the launch event for the latest smartphone. It is said that because of the obstruction from Google, the launch event had come to a temporary cancelation.

Last Tuesday, Acer made an announcement that they were going to launch a new smartphone A800 with Aliyun mobile OS. Developed by Alibaba Group, Aliyun mobile operation system beard the mission of countervailing with Google’s Android System. However, the planned launch event, which should have started on the afternoon of Sep 13, turned out to be cancelled only one hour before the start time.

Shortly afterwards, Aliyun Company made an official statement, “our cooperative partner received a notice from Google. It said that Google would break ties of its cooperation of Android and relevant technologies with Acer if Acer went ahead and installed Aliyun OS.”

In other words, Google will starve out Acer once Acer Smartphone adopted Aliyun system. At the moment, Google’s Android Operation System occupies more than 60% market share in the global mobile market. That’s why it can play such a powerful role as the obstruction against Aliyun System’s development.

Ren Zhengfei, the head of the handset business at Huawei Corp., had showed his worries in an internal presentation, “indeed, the reason why we develop terminal operation system is out of the strategic need. So we can have the substitutes once the main producers starve us out.” From what he said, we can anticipate a phenomenon that most hand-set vendors are in search for substitutes in case of emergency, from which Alibaba sees room for home-grown operation system like Aliyun.

Though occupying more than 60% market share, Google’s leading role isn’t safe at all. While Windows Phone is the most obvious competitor, other lesser-known platforms such as Aliyun are also drawing attention.

Aliyun expects the number of smartphone manufacturers using Linux-based Aliyun to increase to five by the end of this year from the current two: Beijing Tianyu Communication Equipment Co., whose phones are sold under its K-Touch brand, and the major home appliances maker Haier Electronics Group Co.. Acer is the third one.

Alibaba, who operates 2 popular shopping websites Taobao and Tmall, provides its Aliyun with advantages like the integration of the online payment. Also, according to a report by the BCG, China already has 193 million online shoppers, more than 170 million in the U.S. Taobao and Tmall are expecting to host one trillion yuan ($157.6 billion) in transactions this year. Taken this into consideration, we can see the potential of Aliyun as well as the ambition of Alibaba Group.

According to statistics by China’s Electronic Bank, the total number of personal online banking users reached approximately 300 million in the first half of 2012.

In the light of the interim statements, the performance of several players are quite noticeable. Here are some data for H1 2012:

• Agriculture Bank of China has 77.14 million personal online banking users and its transactions amount reached 39.97 billion yuan (USD 6.32 billion)
• Bank of China: 78.08 million registered personal e-banking users, growing for 40.13% compared with the same period in 2011. And the growth of transaction amount is 30.17%.
• Construction Bank of China: 101.68 million online banking users, up 20.27% from the end of 2011. The total number of online banking users from these three banks has come to the level of 250 million, indicating strong growth for H1 2012

According to the quarterly market monitor report for Q2 2012 by Enfodesk, China B2B operation revenue was 3.39 billion (USD 536 million). The quarter on quarter growth was 11.3% and the year-on-year growth was 13%.

Chinese macro-economy had nice growth in Q2 and the import and export trade brought great chances to B2B e-commerce. Based on the data by General Administration of Customs, the total transaction reached 98.06 billion yuan (USD 15.49 billion).

The business model of Chinese B2B industry has remained the same for a long time, which need innovation if expecting long-run development.

What advantages exited for China airlines? What opportunities lie forward? What actions should be taken to reshape the Europe-to-Asia route? You would find the answers to those questions in this article.

Cost advantage of China’s Airlines

The cost advantage of China airlines enables them to be competitive among other international airlines. The low cost base is 10 to 20 percent lower than other Asian airlines and 30 to 40 percent lower than international legacy carriers. Meanwhile, the low labor rates, modern fleet and low fares continue to strengthen this predominance.

Growing Consumer Base From Travel Sector

Based on another study by the BCG Group, Chinese travelers will take 2.5 billion trips and spend approximately $850 billion by 2020. Going beyond the borders will generally become an essential part of Chinese travelling. More outgoing passengers forecast more trips in and out of China. It is estimated that Chinese carriers will account for 6% global capacity.

Chinese Traveler’s Preference

There are 2 preferences of Chinese travelers to be notices. One is the purchasing tendency. Chinese travelers are more likely to go shopping when going abroad. The other one is about their information source. They will turn to the internet for all information, including ticket promotions, package tours.

Guidelines For Airlines Out of China

Given the threat from China airlines and the opportunity of reshaping the route, here are some suggestions from BCG for action.

1. Join forces in the industry to diversify the offerings and lower cost
2. Realize the brand loyalty by targeting at specific groups and quality improvement of service
3. Explore ways to build win-win situation with Chinese carriers

Source: The Big Squeeze: How China’s Emerging Airlines Will Change The Industry by BCG

Beijing University and Alibaba Research Center jointly issued a report on “Those started online shops”.

The report demonstrates that large number of part-time sellers swarm into the main forces of online selling, which accounts for 70% of the whole online retailers. They are white-collars, students, unemployed youths, housewives, farmers and even retired workers among. Except for conventional supplies like clothes and accessories, primary products, crafts and local specialties are brought onto the online shelves.

The report also indicates that the commodities sold by part-time sellers are targeting some specific groups while full-time sellers meet the need of public groups.

We can anticipate that with the diversification of mass consumption, small batch production, small-scale operation and personalized service will be the trend of online commercial activities.

Mobile IM holds the safe lead among all mobile applications with the usage rate of 86.7%. The usage rates of mobile payment and flight ticket booking are much lower compared with others. But with the enhancement of mobile security, we cannot ignore their potentials to experience growth in the near future. The growth of other applications is comparatively stable.

Recently, a new form of ad is formally launched on Sina Weibo. This social ads enable weibo posts to reach ALL followers rather than being buried; this is like Facebook Promote. The promoted posts will appear as the first on users’ weibo home page after logging in. The post will sink as more posts get published and appear on the timeline. Each user will only see one promoted post within 24 hours.

Sina had selected some advertisers to test this advertising form. The characters of “From Weibo Promote” will turn up at the bottom left of the promoted post. There is no limitation on the quantity of marketers’ weibo posts. BMW China and Ctrip have used this advertising form.

With more than 2 billion weibo users, this new advertising form is very promising. Let’s take a look at how it works and how it charges.

This new ad format will charge advertisers based on the total impressions delivered. Every impression costs 0.1 yuan.  Marketers can set the total number of impression to deliver. Reports on performance will also be available on total number of re-post, total comments, clicks and exposure.

Sina Weibo is secretly developing a new design in which posting will have visibility settings and individual users’ Weibo page more design options.

In the new design which will likely be released in late September, users can publish posts which only certain groups of friends can see and comment (can’t re-post though). The new design will allow users to set a Facebook cover photo like photos on top of her home page.