The premature birth and premature death of China Mobile's "5G message"

On May 11, the 5G Message App launched by China Mobile was hastily removed from the Apple App Store and some Android App Stores less than a day after it was launched. Although China Mobile responded to public concerns with "technical issues", the many similarities between the 5G Message App and Fetion still give people a glimpse of China Mobile's ambitions in the instant messaging market. As a giant in the domestic communications industry, China Mobile has advantages in terms of financial strength and user base, but it is still not easy for China Mobile to make 5G Messages defeat powerful and mature competitors such as WeChat and DingTalk.

Reserve a seat in advance

On May 11, in response to the 5G Message App being removed from the shelves just one day after its launch, a relevant person in charge of China Mobile told the Beijing Business Daily reporter that because some terminals currently do not support the 5G message function, China Mobile has developed the 5G Message App, which allows developers to truly experience the message interaction service after completing the development of the Chatbot (intelligent chat robot) application, and attract a large number of developers to actively participate in the construction of the 5G message cooperation ecosystem. It is not a product released for commercial use by customers.

Beijing Business Daily reporters noticed that users who have downloaded the 5G Message App can still log in normally. The App has two functional sections: "Conversation" and "Discovery". The "Discovery" section displays a series of SMS applets, including "Suning.com" and "Train Ticket Booking".

However, the functions of China Mobile's 5G Message App are not yet perfect. Although many SMS applets can be opened, they cannot be used normally. In addition, the App does not support group chat function. In an Android app store, China Mobile's 5G Message App is rated only 1 point.

In April this year, China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom, the three major operators, jointly released the "5G Message White Paper", calling on industry partners to work together to fully launch 5G message services for users as soon as possible.

Zhang Jiaxing, chief scientist of 360 Finance and expert in artificial intelligence, told Beijing Business Daily that 5G messaging provides a unified conversational interaction interface. In addition to the textual conversations that traditional SMS can provide, this type of conversation also supports multiple forms such as images, videos, and interactive cards. These rich forms make interactions between people more comfortable, but the greater benefit is that it provides a global unified conversational interface across apps, mobile phone manufacturers, and operators.

"Due to the joint release of the 5G Message White Paper by the three operators in the early stage, which aroused high public attention, in order to protect the name of '5G Message' from being maliciously occupied, China Mobile recently launched it on the application market. Due to some technical problems, the App is currently temporarily offline and will be back online later." A relevant person in charge of China Mobile said.

Although China Mobile explained the reasons for the launch and removal of the 5G Message App, it is obviously not that simple. According to the "5G Message White Paper", ordinary users do not need to download the client and can receive 5G messages at the native message entrance of the terminal. However, China Mobile is using an independent App to provide 5G message services, which is confusing.

Looking closely, it is not difficult to understand why an independent 5G messaging app is being developed for Apple phones at this stage. As introduced in the "5G Message White Paper", Android phones natively support 5G messaging services, and users do not need to download independent apps; but whether iOS phones can natively support it still depends on Apple's policy. This means that iOS phones do not support native 5G messaging at this stage.

So, why does China Mobile also want to develop an independent app for Android phones? Internet research expert Jin Yi told the Beijing Business Daily reporter, "The current short message profit pool has been almost completely subverted by apps. For China Mobile, if it wants to recover its market share that has been eroded by apps, launching an independent 5G messaging service app is a shortcut."

Fetion re-shell?

In fact, China Mobile's "calculations" go far beyond this. Beijing Business Daily reporters noticed that when users log in to the 5G Message App for the first time, they will receive a text message notification saying "You have officially opened the Hefei service", and the privacy policy in the 5G Message App is the same as that of Hefei. If the language of the mobile phone system is set to "English", the English names of 5G Message and Hefei App are both "Fetion".

Functionally, the 5G Message App is quite similar to Fetion. The 5G Message App allows users to send text messages to others in the "Conversation" section, and the recipient of the text message can be anyone in the mobile phone address book. Among them, China Mobile users will be exempt from text message charges when sending text messages to each other, and sending text messages to non-China Mobile users will be charged at 0.01 yuan per message.

"Fetion" and its predecessor "Fetion" are China Mobile's layout in the field of instant messaging, and its competitors include QQ and WeChat. Among them, Fetion was launched in May 2007 and had 500 million registered users at its peak. Since China Mobile adopted a relatively closed operation mode (only mobile users were supported at the beginning of opening), Fetion's market popularity quickly declined after the birth of WeChat in 2011.

Jin Yi believes that the decline of Fetion is actually because it failed to solve the pain point of users - the cost of SMS and data traffic. For ordinary users, the main factors to measure the quality of an App are convenience and cost.

In December 2018, China Mobile launched a new product, Hefeixin. As an upgraded version of Fetion, Hefeixin allows users to make free calls to each other for a certain period of time. Hefeixin focuses on integrated communications, serving both B-end and C-end, and is involved in both the mass business of WeChat and the government and enterprise service market of DingTalk. However, more than a year after its launch, Hefeixin has not shaken the market position of WeChat and DingTalk.

Industry insiders believe that 5G messaging and Hefeixun are related by inheritance, which reflects that China Mobile still has huge ambitions in the instant messaging market. "After 5G messaging is fully implemented in the future, Hefeixun's business may be fully introduced into 5G messaging. In other words, Hefeixun has evolved into the 5G era first, and it will depend on how WeChat and QQ respond next," said Ma Jihua, a senior telecom analyst.

Turnaround test

As the successor of Fetion and Hefeixun, whether 5G messaging can help China Mobile win a "comeback" in the instant messaging market and the government and enterprise market has become the focus of outside attention.

Ma Jihua said, "Overall, 5G new messages are products of the next era brought about by technological upgrades. They create a new track. Both new and old social applications can rely on such technology to improve and change themselves. Of course, new applications may have no baggage and are more likely to succeed."

It is understood that 5G messages are built on the GSMA RCS UP standard, so they are also called RCS messages. At present, the global market for industry SMS is worth $62 billion. It is predicted that by 2021, the global market for industry SMS based on RCS will reach $74 billion.

Although the market prospects are broad, it is not easy for China Mobile to carve up a sufficient share of it. Jin Yi believes that China Mobile has not done a good enough job in creating a "customer-centric" strategic thinking. In the domestic communications industry, China Mobile is the leader, but some news of neglecting users has frequently appeared, making China Mobile's image not friendly enough. When there are two or more service providers in the market at the same time, many users may not choose China Mobile.

However, China Mobile's advantages are also obvious. Compared with potential competitors such as Tencent and Alibaba, China Mobile is not inferior in strength. In terms of users, as of the end of the first quarter of 2020, China Mobile had 946 million mobile users; in terms of funds, China Mobile's free cash flow in 2019 was as high as 81.713 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 109.1%.

But Jin Yi said that sufficient funds are only the foundation. If China Mobile wants to successfully break through the 5G messaging business, it must truly put its superior resources (talent and investment) into this business. "If China Mobile does it with a do-or-die mentality, then the success rate of China Mobile will be higher. But if China Mobile does not pay enough attention, its 5G messaging business is likely to repeat the mistakes of Fetion," he said.

At present, apart from jointly releasing the "5G Message White Paper" with other operators and launching the 5G Message App, the outside world has not seen any more actions from China Mobile in this regard. Regarding what measures and plans China Mobile has taken to promote the implementation of 5G messages, the Beijing Business Daily reporter contacted the relevant person in charge of China Mobile, but as of press time, no response has been received.

In Jin Yi's opinion, in order to do a good job in 5G messaging, China Mobile needs to do the following things: First, after the official launch of the 5G messaging service, the initial performance may not be so ideal, but China Mobile needs to persevere, otherwise it will repeat the mistakes of Fetion; second, 5G messaging must have a clear positioning, truly solve user pain points, and achieve differentiation; third, it is necessary to build a good 5G messaging ecosystem, fully integrating civil and industrial information, e-commerce, sharing, bills, police and other blocks.