China's 437 million mobile phone users have made the country the world's most promising market for wireless value-added services, a report from research firm Ovum said.
With data contributing 21% of total mobile service revenues by June 2006, Ovum forecasts that WVAS will generate over $11.5 billion revenues in China by 2010, a 48% surge from 2006.
Kevin Lee, a senior analyst with Ovum based in Hong Kong, said messaging will continue to dominate the WVAS sector, contributing to over 63% of total VAS revenues in 2010.
According to Lee, the advent of new media services including mobile music, games and mobile TV, primarily assisted by the high consumption of bandwidth will change the current market scenario.
The research firm also said that SMS, ringback tones and WAP are the fastest-growing services and will continue to be the predominant services in the next few years.
In the upcoming 3G era, Ovum envisages that multimedia content such as mobile TV and mobile music will become mainstream.
Other than these, new applications such as location-based services, mobile blogging and mobile payment will have an appealing growth potential considering the huge landmass and the high mobility of the Chinese population in the country. Ovum believes that push email services will also gain traction in the enterprise market as corporations become more technology-savvy.