Who will have the next chance to move the internet

Undeniably, the future mobile internet will have a huge impact on the existing Internet giants.

Over the past three years, with the development of smartphones and tablets, as well as the popularity of 3G and 4G mobile communication networks in the field of communications, there has been a sharp increase in data traffic and the number of users on the mobile internet. More and more users are using mobile Internet to get information and communication.

In the second quarter of 2012, Facebook's wireless subscribers increased by 23%, while the number of PC Internet users in the same period increased by only 6%, at that rate, and by the end of 2013, Facebook's wireless users would surpass those of PC users (which, of course, had a large number of duplicates). The same is true of Google, where traffic from mobile phones has taken up a significant portion of its overall traffic and has grown at a faster rate.

At present, the entire IT industry is concerned about a problem whether the mobile internet will replace the traditional PC Internet? If this trend is unstoppable, how will the current pattern of industry change? Where are the opportunities for mobile Internet?

In the mobile internet era, which companies will benefit from the development of mobile Internet?

If you list 10 of the world's largest internet market capitalisation (below, October 5, 2012), you will find that the companies that benefit most from mobile internet are not on this list:

　　

Company

Market value (Billion USD)

Turnover (Billion USD)

Google

2511

431

Microsoft

2502

737

Amazon

1179

543

EBay

620

130

Tencent

613

56

Facebook

448

43

Yahoo + yahoo Japan

411**

82

Baidu

399

29

Alibaba

350*

N/A

Priceline

315

48

notes: Yahoo and Yahoo Japan are two separately listed companies, Yahoo owns part of Yahoo Japan and Alibaba shares, so the market value of the duplicate calculation.

The most beneficial company that is not on the table is Apple. Even today it is not an internet company, and in the past many years it has largely poured traffic to companies such as Google. But in the mobile internet age, it will be the biggest beneficiary.

First, as the world's largest tablet and handset maker, Apple has a huge high-end user base, and its release platform is ready. Second, in the long run, it must be from selling hardware products to (Internet) service direction expansion. On its new operating system and mobile phone, Apple has moved map services from Google's products to its products.

Although the quality of the product is now in doubt, the direction of Apple's service to the Internet will not change. In the PC Internet era, Apple accounted for only 5% of the PC market and had no chance of becoming a mainstream internet company. But the rise of the mobile internet gives it a chance.

Companies in the table, Google, Amazon, Tencent will benefit.

Google is the first company to enter the 3G Internet, as early as 2006 years it has achieved great success in the Japanese market. With its Android phone operating system becoming more and more popular, it occupies the commanding heights of the mobile internet. Amazon has a natural advantage, it is currently the world's largest cloud computing service provider, while it has a lot of books and audio-visual content, it can not make money on mobile terminals, but in the content and services to earn money. Tencent Wireless products account for more than 1/3 of China's overall wireless traffic, and its mobile browsers and micro-credit products in the Chinese market has grown very quickly. Facebook, Alibaba, Baidu and Priceline gain or lose very much or will not be affected. Microsoft, ebay and Yahoo will go downhill.

The majority of the current mobile internet revenue from games and a small amount of advertising, in the future these will be the main business model of mobile web?

At present, we see the mobile internet start-up companies, a lot of focus on the game market, and relatively fast start to make money is also these companies. But games and small advertising revenues are not enough to support the long-term development of mobile Internet. At present the global telecommunications and information industry output value is in trillion dollars, of which mobile communications market is 1.3 trillion of the size. The global gaming market is about 60 billion dollars in size, half of which is the revenue generated by game hardware. Game software and services alone 30 billion of the market size each year, can not pull a trillion-dollar industry rapid development. The size of the advertising market is larger, the 2012 Internet advertising market size of about 120 billion U.S. dollars, but mobile internet advertising is still very small, the effect and online advertising can not be compared.

The long-term sustainable development of mobile internet needs to be combined with cloud computing, through the Revolution of enterprise-class software and services. The world's highest-turnover IT companies, with the exception of Apple and Google, are enterprise-class software and services companies, including IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, HP and Oracle. Each of these companies is tens of billions of or even hundreds of billions of companies, while small and medium-sized enterprise software companies.

However, mobile Internet (including mobile terminals) has so far had a very small impact on the enterprise IT market, contributing little to the revenue of this segment of the market.

Historically, the replacement of old industries by new industries often requires the lives of the industries that have the most influence and the highest share of GDP. For example, in the media sector, the world's richest and most influential people in the early part of the last century were newspaper kings, such as the prototype Hearst of the film Citizen Kane. Half a century ago, these people and enterprises give way to the television industry, the 1960s to 90 's, the most money, most influential is the United States three television networks, CNN, Murdoch and so on. But after the advent of the Internet, they have been placed on the Internet.

From newspapers to the Internet, their business model is the same, each time the new technology is the life of the old industry. We have reason to think that in the mobile internet era is similar, it needs a big market life, this is the enterprise-level market.

According to EU estimates, only the European Union by 2020, the cloud-based enterprise-class market will have a scale of 1 trillion dollars. With the advent of cloud computing, many of the software and services that were originally run locally on bulky computers could be put into the cloud, and terminals could become very convenient, miniaturized and mobile. These are the opportunities for future mobile Internet development. When enterprise-class software and services rely more on mobile internet rather than traditional PC Internet, the former is more important than the latter.

So what are the advantages of enterprise-class services based on cloud computing and mobile internet than the current model?

Here is the cost advantage first. Now a hundreds of-person midsize enterprise renting Amazon Cloud computing services, assuming that 125 units of four qual core CPUs (quad-core processors) are rented for about 140,000 dollars a year, which is equivalent to the labor cost of a system administrator in the United States plus the cost of electricity, The server hardware itself is equivalent to being used in vain. If you buy the same capabilities of the server, the cost of a year of hardware depreciation will be 120,000 to 200,000 U.S. dollars, which means that the traditional enterprise Services hardware cost and maintenance cost is at least twice times based on cloud computing services. Of course, it takes a lot of new work to move enterprise-class services to cloud computing and to connect to the mobile Internet. And these new jobs are new opportunities.

The second is convenience. In Europe and the United States and Japan, enterprise-class IT services are almost ubiquitous, such as shopping malls of the cash register, courier company's electronic signature terminals, car rental company's checkout and receipt printer, a variety of monitoring systems. These devices can be replaced with smartphones and tablets. In fact, many department stores in the United States have started using smartphones instead of traditional cash registers. In the future we will see many enterprise-class services will be built on smartphones and Tablet PCs.

In the top ten Internet companies list, half in the United States, some in China, individual in Japan, in the mobile internet era, this pattern will change?

I personally think this pattern will not change, the United States will account for six or seven, China and Japan will account for three or four. Many people have been wondering when China could replace America as the dominant new technology era. I don't think China has this condition yet. If we look at the company above, American companies, in addition to Priceline, are global companies. China's companies are regional companies.

The idea of an American-run company is very different from that of China. America's own domestic market has grown relatively slowly, so many companies, large and small, have been making products from the start to the global market, and the idea of product design and implementation continues. If only for the domestic market, it is easy to encounter the development of the ceiling. The same is true of Hollywood movies, where many films are made to target the global market, so that people of all cultures can understand them, so they have no complex cultural background.

Chinese companies, because of the rapid growth of the macro economy in the past 30 years, the annual growth is guaranteed as long as the Chinese market is well established. As a result, most companies are looking at the domestic market. And once the domestic market is saturated, these companies prefer to engage in new industries rather than enter the international market. This way of thinking does not change, it is difficult to replace the United States in the IT industry's dominant position.