China Unicom, the country’s second largest telecom carrier by market value, is expected to officially launch a mobile payment company soon.
The independent firm is under undergoing preparations including official registration, license application and drafting a long-term plan, according to the telecom operator’s recent recruiting notice published on its website.
The company is currently hiring for positions including mobile Internet payment product managers and SIM card senior technicians.
Calls to China Unicom yesterday confirmed that the company was making preparations for the plan, but it declined to disclose the exact launch date.
Industry watchers said both mobile Internet payment and handset payment services will be officially launched soon, judging from the specific positions sought for hire.
“China Unicom’s mobile Internet payment services will most probably be launched in the first half of this year,” Zhang Meng, an analyst with Analysys International, an Internet-based consultancy, told the Global Times yesterday.
“And handset payment services, which were initially kicked off in four cities, namely Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing prior to a nationwide roll-out, will also be operated by the newly launched company,”Zhang said.
Actually China Mobile, the country’s largest mobile network operator, already launched its mobile Internet payment services last August, attracting more than 20,000 enterprises especially those e-commerce websites.
But its handset payment services were not popularized mainly because of technological obstacles, analysts said.
“To grab the mobile Internet payment market, what the telecom operator needs to do is to cooperate with more merchants and third party payment companies like Alipay, China’s leading independent third-party online payment platform,”Zhu Jingsong, an analyst with China Galaxy Securities Co, told the Global Times yesterday.
“Transaction security is phone users’ major concern,”Zhu said.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology asked China Mobile to drop its developed RF-SIM technology and to adopt NFC instead last June, which Zhu said “would be a major blow to China Mobile.”
China Mobile has reportedly already purchased 1 million RF-SIM cards.
China Unicom works with technology providers to apply the NFC compatible solutions, which can be retrofitted to existing phones without replacing new mobile phones.
“For China Unicom, cultivating users’ shopping habits is the pressing matter of the moment,” Zhang Meng of Analysys International said.