Hong Kong-based Tom.com, the first Internet-based provider of multimedia messaging service (MMS) on the Chinese mainland, will use that advantage to help it become one of the biggest Internet portals on the mainland, said a senior executive of the Hong Kong-listed multimedia company.
"MMS will have an explosive growth next year with the increasing supply of mobile phones and the promotion of the China Mobile Communications Corp and service providers," said Wang Leilei, deputy chief operating officer and head of Tom.com's online business.
The company will use its advantage of being first on the scene to gain from the growth of the market, Wang added.
"We are ahead of other service providers by four to five months in terms of content and service and that will become a time threshold for them," he said.
The company and China Mobile are holding a Multimedia Messaging Service Do-It-Yourself Contest between today and January 25 to collect pictures from users and promote MMS, which lets mobile-phone users send images and other multimedia messages.
Wang said he believed that, by the middle of next year, MMS would become an important revenue pool for his company, like the popular Short Messaging Service (SMS) which sends only text messages.
Sources from Tom.com said that, in November, about 200,000 MMS messages were sent via its website. The total volume from October to December will be around 300,000, they said.
Ye Bing, head of the Data Service Department of China Mobile, said that his company's 50,000 MMS subscribers had sent 1 million multimedia messages in the past two months.
Wang Leilei predicted that Tom.com's subscribers might send 1 million multimedia messages every month via its website by mid-2003.
China Mobile launched MMS in October and charges users 0.90 yuan (10 US cents) per message, nine times the cost of a text message. The revenue will be distributed among the mobile operator and service providers such as Tom.com.
Wang said that more than 5 million text messages are sent via Tom.com's website every day and the company's monthly revenues from the service reached 10 million yuan (US$1.2 million) in September.
Although only big names such as Nokia and Sony-Ericsson provide four or five mobile-phone models capable of sending multimedia messages, the situation will change next month when Motorola and Panasonic release their MMS phones.
(China Daily December 26, 2002)
