In Da E-House

Posted on May 17, 2008
Filed Under China Business | Leave a Comment

Shanghai-based real estate services company E-House (China) Holdings Limited (NYSE: EJ) reported first quarter revenues of $33.2 million, up 107 percent year-on-year, before market on Thursday. Net income for the company was $8.7 million, up 97 percent year-on-year. Primary real estate agency services brought in $21.9 million of revenue in the period, increasing 72 percent from a year ago. Revenue from secondary real estate brokerage services came in at $2.8 million, up 58 percent year-on-year, while real estate consulting and information services increased 467 percent year-on-year to $8.3 million.

For the second quarter, E-House expects revenues of between $41 million and $44 million.

The consulting and information services includes the China Real Estate Information Circle (CRIC) database that holds real estate transaction data for 30 cities in China. MSN Money has some more details:

…[Zhou Xin, E-House chairman and CEO] Our results in the first quarter were also helped by a substantial increase in consulting and information services revenues as a result of strategic arrangements with leading developers in China, which cover a wide range of consulting services including market analysis research and CRIC information services.”

…We will also continue our initiative to promote paid subscriptions to our CRIC system, which we began in April. We have already signed strategic agreements with several leading real estate developers covering real estate consulting and information services. This will provide a further boost to our real estate consulting and information services revenues for this year.”

…[Cheng Li-Lan, CFO]While primary real estate services will provide solid growth and continue to contribute the largest share of revenues, we expect revenue contribution from real estate consulting and information services to increase substantially this year as compared to recent years. This will also help to slightly reduce the seasonal fluctuations of our revenues.”

Revenues from real estate consulting and information services were $8.3 million for the first quarter in 2008, an increase of 467% from $1.5 million for the same period in 2007. The increase was primarily due to substantial consulting revenue included in strategic arrangements the Company entered into with major developers covering multiple cities and projects.

467% increase? Yow! This is an excellent example of a company that realizes that its operational data also has its own intrinsic, monetary, value.

Oracle in China: Kiss My SaaS

Posted on May 14, 2008
Filed Under China Business, China Distribution, China Internet, China SMB | Leave a Comment

The South China Morning Post reports:

Oracle Corp, the world’s largest enterprise software supplier, has launched its CRM On Demand Release 15 and Mobile Sales Assistant for BlackBerry products on the mainland, a move it hopes will improve the productivity of customer sales teams.

“We are widening the functionality gap over competing solutions to grow our market share and address the rapidly emerging opportunity with what we call Social CRM,” said Simon Banks, a general manager for CRM On Demand at Oracle Asia-Pacific.

…The main component of Oracle’s new on-demand CRM products is called Sticky Notes.

It allows users to take specific objects, such as “top accounts” or “contacts” and include them within their preferred Web portal applications, such as iGoogle or MyYahoo.

…There is plenty of room to grow for on-demand CRM players on the mainland, but local players - such as Xtools CRM and 800App.com - lead domestic demand, according to Balaka Baruah Aggarwal, senior manager at Singapore-based information technology market analyst firm Springboard Research.

Springboard forecasts that the SaaS CRM market in Asia will reach US$460 million by 2010, up from US$69 million in 2006.

“We estimate the SaaS CRM market on the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau will make up about 20 per cent of that market,” Ms Aggarwal said.

This comes on the heels of Salesforce.com’s splash in China.

SaaS (software-as-a-service) is on one level (think email) already ubiquitous, on another (think salesforce.com) a fast-growing threat to traditional client-server solutions, and on another (think virtual data centers and cloud computing) still a fair bit away. Everyone (including Microsoft) are positioning themselves with SaaS-enabled applications for the future network-centric computing world.

There’s no reason why China won’t move in the same direction. If anything, China may move even faster than the rest of the world. One of the benefits of a late adoption of IT is that there are less legacy systems cluttering up data centers around China.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that China should expect an explosion of SaaS use. It’s not that the technology is too new or that the infrastructure isn’t in place - China has both the IT savvy and the bandwidth in spades. The problem is with customers.

Simply put, not a whole lot of Chinese firms other than enterprises have the business processes in place to really benefit from applications such as CRM or ERP. SMBs in China have embraced IT, but it’s still just an adjunct to operations rather than a value-adding enabler.

The article included quotes from enterprises on how wonderful Oracle’s solution is and how much better their lives are for it, blah, blah, blah. But not until China’s SMBs get their heads around IT as a core business tool will SaaS start to take off.

上Fi: Now with Shopping

Posted on May 13, 2008
Filed Under China Business, China Internet, Wireless Networks | Leave a Comment

Shanghai Daily reports:

SHANGHAI has established a wireless network covering Nanjing Road Pedestrian Mall in Huangpu District, a newspaper reported.

People can access the one-megabyte per second network on laptops or mobile phones at all shops along the street, Wenhui Daily said.

The fee for the service is 0.06 yuan (0.85 US cents) per minute, the report added.

The district government planned to extend the wireless network soon to cover Beijing Road Hardware Street, Yu Garden Commercial Area and Xizhang Road Commercial Area, the report said.

You still need to buy the China Telecom card, of course.

上Fi Squeaks into the Inner Ring Road

Posted on May 9, 2008
Filed Under Beijing Olympics, China Business, China Internet, Wireless Networks | Leave a Comment

Shanghai Daily reports:

Shanghai Mobile and Shanghai Telecom both signed with Putuo District yesterday to expand wireless coverage for the first time within the region of Inner Ring Road, the central part of the city.

Previously, carriers signed with governments in suburban areas on the “wireless city” initiative, including Baoshao, Minhang and Nanhui districts and the Chongming County.

Today, Shanghai Mobile will sign similar agreements with Xuhui District where the major Olympic stadiums are.

…The number of wireless Internet hot spots in Shanghai will hit more than 3,600 by the end of this year - triple last year’s level.

China Telecom will establish an additional 2,000 Wi-Fi hot spots this year from an existing 1,000 now. Shanghai Mobile will establish 666 more Wi-Fi hot spots this year from the current 100 to 200 Wi-Fi sites.

…In the city, carriers adopt various methods such as WiMax, 3G and current mobile networks to construct wireless networks, besides major stream Wi-Fi (802.11 standard).

Shanghai Telecom said it was considering adopting WiMax (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access), a wireless broadband access technology built on the 802.16 standard.

…Intel Corp will invest US$500 million in Taiwan mainly on WiMax.

It is also in negotiations with carriers and the governments to be involved in the wireless city project, according to Sean Maloney, Intel’s executive vice president, who visited Shanghai last month.

Shanghai Mobile plans to set up 3,000 3G base stations in Shanghai this year.

China Telecom’s Putuo deployment is in the inner ring road, but just a bit of it in the north west of the central city. China Telecom does have WiFi spots in the inner city, just not anything approaching district-wide saturation.

China Mobile’s deployment in Xuhui is of a different scale entirely. With three months to go before the Olympics, they’re cutting it a little fine. Xuhui district is home to the road, transport, retailing, business, and utter chaos hub that is Xujiahui. Even thinking about it can induce agoraphobic cringing. The place is utterly packed at just about any given moment. The stadiums are about two kilometers south of it, so Xujiahui probably won’t be within the Olympic-area coverage. China Mobile got the head start there because it’s an Olympic sponsor. With the density of population there (and two or three big computer malls), Xuhui will be an interesting test for their solution.

Intel’s Mr. Maloney was probably in Shanghai for the Intel Developer’s Forum last month. Previous reports had stated pretty clearly that WiMAX was going to be in the mix for the project, so I’m not sure what the “negotiations” were about.

Finally World Telecommunication Day Means Something

Posted on May 9, 2008
Filed Under Apparatchiks, Beijing Olympics, China Business | Leave a Comment

China Tech News reports:

Top management from China Telecom has disclosed to the local media that a measure regarding China’s telecom industry restructuring may be released on May 17, the World Telecommunication Day.

The measure, according to sources quoted in various local media, will probably be published on May 17, but there might still be some changes on the date as the personnel arrangement has not been fixed. The Chinese government is now quickly organizing a lead team for China Mobile and the arrangement of Chang Xiaobing, current president of China Unicom, is one of the focuses of the personnel arrangement.

Because of all this harried preparation, only the relevant measures and personnel arrangement will be published on May 17, while the real network separation and asset acquisition will probably be postponed until after the Olympic Games in August 2008.

There’s no way they were going to start breaking apart and rebuilding the entire telecoms industry three months before the Olympics.

Hopefully Mr. Chang’s personal “personnel arrangement” will include tickets to the Olympics opening ceremony.

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