PacificNet has entered into an agreement with MOABC to purchase a 20% ownership equity interest in MOABC to strengthen PacificNet's wireless internet, mobile games, and mobile e-commerce unit, the company is said to have quoted.
Registered users of the MOABC portal are allowed to create their own personal profiles, share photos and videos and post blogs to 'Mo-Space', a mobile personal web space for personal content, photo and video sharing similar to services offered by 'MySpace' and 'YouTube' in the US, the company said.
As a mobile game portal, MOABC recently entered into a profit-sharing cooperation agreement with NetEase.com on a newly launched mobile game titled 'The World". It is a Mobile Mass Multi-user Online Role Playing Game, or Mobile MMORPG Game, developed in JAVA that can be played by a large number of concurrent users online or offline using mobile phones, including various JAVA-enabled phones by Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Samsung, Siemens, and Lenovo. MOABC is an operation and promotion partner for 'The World' and will actively promote the mobile game on its WAP.MOABC.COM site on a profit sharing basis with NetEase.com, the company added.
"With the early success of our mobile WAP portal services in China, we believe the market potential is strong for our WAP.MOABC.COM mobile portal and community, especially in light of the impending launch of 3G services in China," said Marco Lai, President of MOABC. "With over 11 million registered users, we believe our fun and entertaining mobile portal and sizable user-base will contribute positively to PacificNet's overall strategy in mobile gaming and e-commerce. This investment by PacificNet should create great synergies in management, sales/marketing and mobile Internet technology. With China being the largest and fastest growing telecom market in the world, with over 400 million mobile subscribers, we believe our experience in mobile social networking services will contribute positively to PacificNet's growing CRM and gaming service network in China."
According to industry forecasts, mobile online games will become more popular with the advent of 3G networks in China. Forecasts frequently note that online and offline mobile gaming differs greatly in terms of their service models. Online gaming uses a telecom service model earning revenues from traffic fees during play, while offline mobile gaming is simply a game application downloaded onto a handset for a small fee. The forecasts predict strong growth for WAP, JAVA and BREW, while the proportion of SMS-enabled games will drop. With over 400 million mobile phone users, China has already become the largest mobile population in the world. Moreover, the number of mobile users is still growing rapidly and has far exceeded the number of pc- based Internet users, which is about 120 million, in China.
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