Just like with the evolution of the telephone from landlines to mobiles, e-commerce is shifting away from the desktop into other aspects of our lives. According to the research by CCID Consulting, the turnover of China's e-commerce market in 2006 reached 1,100 billion Yuan, a year on year increase of 48.6%. As the tendency is towards a greater IT application society, everyone is looking forward to the wonderful prospects and excellent business opportunities of mobile e-commerce.

Currently, the mobile e-commerce services provided by China Mobile and China Unicom include: mobile phone purse, mobile phone stock market, mobile phone lottery, mobile OA, unified message service (UM), personal information management (PIM), wireless advertisement (WAD). In some developed provinces, the mobile commerce services provided by operators are even more abundant, for example: China Mobile introduced VIP electronic cards, mobile phone payment, on-call medical treatment, mobile ticket-booking services and so on in Hunan Province, and these services are very successful.

From 2003 to 2006, the transaction amount of mobile payments in China increased 15.3 times, from 30 million Yuan to 490 million Yuan. This growth rate seems to be swift and violent. But the high growth rate cannot cover the shortfall of gross amount. The 490 million Yuan transaction revenues seem to be negligible in China's huge business transaction market. The proportion of mobile payment is only 1.2% of e-payment. Only 5% of mobile users use mobile terminals to carry out commercial payment.

Obviously, the high growth rate of mobile e-commerce mainly stems from overly low numbers in the past years. This is not a real qualitative leap forward. The high cognition, low recognition and low rate of utilization of mobile e-commerce are currently the bottlenecks that limit the large-scale development of mobile e-commerce. On this basis, I think that improvement in the recognition and rate of utilization among the public users will be the breakthrough point for explosive growth of this field.

In China, the existing 500 million mobile phone users provide fertile soil for mobile IT application. With the gradual strengthening of users' IT application consciousness and their demand on the convenience of small amounts financial services, it will be the general trend for e-commerce to be widely accepted by the public. Users have reasons for their hesitation. The key to this problem shall not be simply concluded as the inertia of history.

The apprehension of users is well understood, including whether the e-commerce products aimed at the public are stable, convenient and flexible enough. In conclusion, CCID Consulting thinks that the problem that needs to be settled urgently is how to work out the relations among the four parties: operator, financial system, traditional manufacturers and users, and how to build an operating mechanism that satisfies all parties. For operators, they shall further strengthen wireless transmission security, enhance network quality, and implement a new cell phone card system.

In other words, they shall improve the "stability." At the same time, the banking industry needs to share their system of credit with operators, establish advantages in large payment amounts. In addition, they need to fully cooperate with operators in small payment amounts, and they need to circulate capital by using the fast and convenient financial system network. In other words, they need to improve the "convenience."

For product suppliers, they need to provide individualized products on the basis of abiding by good faith. They need to carry out full interaction to improve the "flexibility." As long as we have the advantages of "stability, convenience and flexibility," it will only be a matter of time potential users grow accustomed to these services. We fully believe it will not be long before this happens.