China’s Mobile Internet Feeling the Chill
Guess you’ve noticed, right after Mary Meeker the Queen of Internet gave a speech about Internet trends at the D10 conference, her slide deck dubbed Internet Trends 2012 out of question dominated headlines once again.
Interestingly, though titled Internet Trends, a large chunk of the slide deck was talking about mobile Internet, on its rapid growth, its monetizing progress, its ads spending and so on.
Indeed, the the slide was eyeing the global market while China especially felt the heat over the past two years with abundant capital injecting to the market and numerous mobile-targeted startup sprang up from like no where.
However, it seems that starting the first quarter, the growth lost its momentum in China. According to Beijing-based market researcher Analysys International, in Q1 of this year, Chinese mobile Internet investment declined to US$ 52.93 million (5 disclosed cases), or down 88.1% year-over-year and 91.5% quarter-over-quarter.
While only couple months ago, in the last quarter of 2011, a total of US$ 290 million was invested into 14 cases (all disclosed cases).
Gloomy global economy, increasing concern over mobile product’s monetization ability, too many copycats without too much differentiation among other reasons altogether contributed to the shrink in mobile heat. Are we seeing it turning around soon? Probably not. For startups who already raised a timely funding before the cooling down, make the funding last, money-bleeding marketing campaign won’t be the best strategy for now. For those who failed in securing money, survival would be the first and foremost thing you should be considering about from this moment on.