Vivame plans 2014 move on bullish market outlook

Beijing Vivame Information Technology Co, China's largest provider of mobile magazines, will be considering an overseas listing around 2014, while the country is expected to welcome a boost in growth in the mobile Internet market, said the company chief.

"The boom times in the mobile Internet industry in the country are expected to continue, as the forthcoming commercial rollout of the next-generation network will greatly improve mobile Internet-based user experience," Han Ying, founder and chief executive of Beijing Vivame Information Technology Co, who will attend the Boao Forum for the Asia Annual Conference, open Sunday through Tuesday, said in an exclusive interview with the Global Times.

"I believe 2014 is likely to be a breakout year for the country's mobile Internet market. And thus my company might be considering an overseas move at that time to increase cash flow into the booming market," Han said.

China has been moving to the fourth-generation (4G) network in recent years, although commercial use of the third-generation (3G) network was only launched in 2009.

Three more cities, Beijing, Tianjin and Qingdao, will be included in a large-scale trial of China's homegrown 4G standard, TD-LTE technology, starting this year, in addition to the six cities that have already tried out the technology beginning in January 2011, Li Yue, president of China Mobile Communications Corp, the country's largest telecom carrier in terms of subscribers, said at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona in late February.

Vivame is one of many firms running mobile Internet-related businesses that have seen rapid growth in recent years. The company's subscribers hit nearly 46 million, on a monthly growth of roughly 4 million, according to Han, who also set a target of 80 million subscribers by the end of the year.

He attributed the high growth to the country's booming market for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers, which was spurred on by the launch of the 3G network nationwide.

China became the world's largest smartphone market in the third quarter of last year, and it was also the second-largest marketplace for tablet devices last year, according to the US-based research agency International Data Corporation.

Companies in the field of mobile reading, like Vivame, will see continued growth in years to come, industry analyst Sun Peilin told the Global Times.

The number of mobile reading subscribers in China grew to 309 million in the fourth quarter of last year, a 33 percent growth over the same period of the previous year, according to Beijing-based Analysys International.