Want to buy a phone?
Last week Nokia announced a deal with China Postel under which the Chinese firm would spend around US$2.5bn acquiring its phones for distribution around China - and that’s just this year. In case you’re wondering how many phones that gets you, reports suggest it’s around 20m (over 100m units were sold in China in 2006). Engaging China suggests that the move is a sign that China’s main distributors are moving towards stocking a more limited range of better-known brands as the market matures - Postel has been China’s leading distributor for eight years, with about 30% of the market last year.
On reading the report I couldn’t help wondering whether we’re seeing mobiles becoming a low-margin high-volume commodity in China. The failure to move forwards on 3G must be limiting opportunities for selling high-end phones with more value-added features and higher margins. That could have worrying implications for the mobile manufacturers - China is Nokia’s biggest single market, accounting for 12% of net sales last year.
June 12, 2007 at 10:20 pm
I am in need of a wireless data collection tool that will enable me to make custom forms on my Blackberry or Motorola phone. The form need to support drop down menus, check boxes, support GPS, maybe bar coding and photo capture. Does anyone know of a product or service that can support wireless data collection like this?
June 14, 2007 at 6:00 am
I have been working in marketing industry for about 5 years and we found a solution that does this. We use it for wireless bar code reading and GPS tracking. The best part is we can customize the forms on-the-fly which saves us a lot of time over a customized solution. The company that makes the product is Westlake out of LA I think. There website is http://www.westlakesoftware.com. Their product is call AirMobility.net. They made a custom Extranet for us for our company to use but their main product site is http://www.airmobility.net. We found this service set up to make it pretty easy for us to migrate the information to our back office system. We use the technology and route it to 40 different servers nationally; has worked flawlessly for about three years. I am note sure if this will match your exact needs but it is what we have been using and it has been working pretty well for us.