Mobile Marketing and Commerce Strategies

China Mobile announced in June it would step into the mobile money space by partnering with China UnionPay to trial mobile money services, but now it’s taking it one step further. Now the operator has announced it will offer its first NFC payments phone in Q3 2012.

According to NFC World, China Mobile has completed the development of its China Mobile Wallet, which will run on an NFC version of the Coolpad 8870 made by Yulong. The phone will support card emulation, tag read/write, peer-to-peer modes and will come with a China Mobile Wallet app, which will let users load China Mobile cards and other services over-the-air. Users will also be able to manage their transportation card through their device.

Yankee Group Senior Analyst Nick Holland comments

"Given the sheer number of mobile subscribers in China, the news of a major Chinese operator commercially launching an NFC device with multi-modal capabilities may significantly move the needle for the technology. It has the capability of reducing chipset costs and furthering the ability for device manufacturers to embed NFC capabilities in handsets, tablets and other hardware. However, given the closed loop nature of the Chinese market, the success for NFC here doesn't correlate to a corresponding uptick in other countries. More meaningful would be a coherent pan-European or North American launch of NFC. Oscar? Isis? Where are you?"