Santa Clara. The new wave of SmartPhones lead by Android and iPhone combines with the evolving of 3G network, give China, the world’s largest mobile market, a great opportunity to lead in mobile outsourcing.
China had been seen as a follower of India in outsourcing industry for decades. It will still take years for China to even build the infrature to support large scale collaboration with US enterprises. Most of large US companies chose India as their primary global R&D center out side of US, like Oracle, Intel, and so on. However, with world’s largest mobile operator jumped into 3G network and Android powered smart phone, followed by China Unicom’s deal with Apple for its iPhone 3.0, things are changing
China is far ahead of Indina for 3G infrastrcuture. The three operators in China annouced more than 30 billion USD combined investment plan on its 3G infrastrcuture. The plan is bigger than most of the developed countries. With world’s largest mobile subsriber base, China indeed will be able to produce large numbers of software companies just for its domestic 3G and SmartPhone development needs. Late last year, China exceeded US became world’s No.1 for internet users. However, it is just a beginning. With the deployment of 3G network this year and smartphones, China willdefinitely have world’s largest Mobile Internet community.
Your may want to ask, what does this to do with mobile outsourcing? It is clear that, its hard for team of developers who cannot use 3G network with a smartphone at their daily life to compete with another team of developers in China who uses them at their daily life. With the infrastruture, the market, the user experiences, China’s outsourcing developers soon will have some thing they had dreamed for decade: advantages.
I don’t have the numbers to show you how soon, but I knew, its coming, no late then 2010.
China Operator’s investment in 3G (Source: Sohu.com):
| China Mobile | China Telecom | China Unicom | |
| Plan of 2009 | Invest 58.8 billion to establish about 60,000 new TD base stations, Make the network cover the business hotspots of 238 prefecture-level cities. | 80 billion investment in three years to upgrade and transform, and optimize the CDMA networks, to strengthen the network signal coverage. | 60 billion investment (make 3G services cover 282 cities within the year of 2009, 55 of these cities should be done in the first half year). |
