Domestic LBS sector flourishing despite downturn
By Chen Jing
Scene One: Chen Yunqi, working with an accounting agency in Beijing, is planning her business trip to Guangzhou. Which hotel will be the most convenient? She with no haste opens the map channel of the search engine, inputs the address of her client and then clicks on the button "Hotels in the neighborhood". Then the position and star-level of seven hotels within one-km-range around the client are shown on the screen.
Scene Two: A Shanghai resident, Mr. Yue Xiaolong is always late for his friends' party because he will easily get lost. And as a result he is nick-named as "Mr. Lost". But now "Mr. Lost" usually arrives at the party ten minutes earlier. Why? He recently bought a potable navigation device (PDN), by which he just needs to input the destination and will get the most suitable route there within a few seconds, and will also get voice indication at each crossing.
Scene Three: Miss Bai from Shenzhen is on her business trip in Nanjing. She suddenly finds her lack of cash in a strange city. Where is an Industrial and Commercial Bank of China? She calls the "Best Tone". Best Tone positions her location and tells her, "Go down for three hundred meters and turn left. You'll find an Industrial and Commercial Bank of China there.
From neighborhood search to route design and positioning service, location-based service (LBS) is providing services to people through channels like Internet, PND, GPS (Global Position System) and mobile-phone terminals. Statistics show, till 2008, the LBS industry in China is developing fast; the total industrial scale has exceeded RMB 52 billion yuan, with a compound growth rate of 34.3 percent.
From here to there: more terminals
Population of 3G and development of auto market is providing new market development space for LBS industry. Lv Guoying, senior deputy-manager of CCID Consulting, expressed, now there was a clear trend for LBS to transform from selling products to selling services; consumers could enjoy more integrated and more colorful services.
Most people know that LBS is provided for route design, including GPS which can make real-time route design and public transfer plan on internet. Electronic map and navigation functions which can solve the problem of "how to get there from here" are the most mature LBS application at present.
However integration between navigation functions and consumer electronic products has become a tendency. Besides the traditional PNDs, consumers have more and more choices. He Ling, deputy president of Navinfo, the largest content provider in the industry, revealed that, in 2008, about 3.4 million mobile phones with navigation function were sold in China. "To install electronic map onto each electronic product with a screen" turned out to be popular in 2008. PSP of Sony and MP4 of Aigo also began to integrate the navigation function. Laptops try to have on-line navigation function and even mobile TVs set foot in navigation.
Lv Guoying believed that richness of navigation terminals enabled consumers to choose more suitable terminals according to their own demands. At the meantime, the traditional professional PNDs reduced their price in competition, down from the former RMB 4000-odd yuan to RMB 1000-odd yuan now. Consumers thus enjoy more benefits.
From here to there: more services
Facing so many dazzling terminals, how should consumers make their choices? Experts express, inside the ecosystem of LBS industry, expansion and innovation of content service has become a trend and different terminals are introducing new services based on their own specifics; therefore it's better for consumers to choose suitable terminal products according to their factual demands.
Take PND, the "big brother" in LBS, as an example. Statistics show, in 2008, PND occupied about 42 percent of the total LBS market shares in China, with a whole-scale valued RMB 22,045 million yuan. While the compound growth rate of PDN in 2008 was only 13.4 percent, almost ten times less than that of GPS mobile phone which was 125.1 percent.
Facing competition from multi-terminals especially GPS mobile phone, PDN has developed many sparkling functions. Real-time traffic condition display is no longer anything new. Integration between mobile speed detection system and PDN has brought it with more applicable values. At the same time, through integration with CMMB (China Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting), people can watch current TV programs through DTV receiver built in PDN. It's also possible that by integration with intelligent traffic system, people can rebroadcast traffic condition through real-time TV programs.
This is the same with mobile phone terminals combined with mobile operators and Internet facing with opened electronic map platform. Not long before, Kingdee, started from enterprise management software, declared to cooperate with the electronic map provider, TUBA, to assist small-and-middle-scale enterprises (SMEs) to realize informatization through LBS. When choosing partners, SMEs can automatically led in electronic map and calculate the exact logistics cost, so as to implement more precise cost control.