Suning offering free protective screen films for phones

Suning Commerce Group, China's largest bricks-and-mortar home appliance retailer by revenue, launched a free store service on Monday to apply protective film on mobile phone screens in an effort to attract more customers as it struggles to soften profit loss.

By 6 pm on Monday, around 100,000 customers had requested the free screen protector service in Suning stores in 34 cities across the country and 180,000 films were applied for these customers, Li Bin, vice president of Suning, said Monday in a post on his Sina Weibo account, a Chinese microblog service.

Li first announced in a post on his Weibo on Friday that Suning would provide free mobile phone screen protective film for anyone at its stores in 34 major cities nationwide including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

Suning's new free service has stoked controversy on the Internet. Some Web users complained on Monday in Weibo posts that the free service is not as good as expected because Suning only provided one size of the film and customers were required to fill in personal information and install the mobile app of suning.com, Suning's site.

Photos of people holding posters to protest against Suning's new free service also circulated online Sunday.

Stephen Guo, a 37-year-old man in Beijing who received the free service at a Suning store in the western part of Beijing on Monday, told the Global Times that the film is small in size and barely covers the screen of his iPhone4.

"There was no other customer who wanted the service but me and no one asked me to install anything on my mobile phone or fill in any information," he said.

A peddler who applies protective screen film on phones at prices ranging from 15 to 25 yuan at the entrance of a subway station in Beijing told the Global Times Monday his business remains unaffected.

"Free service obviously cannot compete with paid service in terms of quality," he said.

"Impacted by the growing popularity of online shopping, Suning has attempted to transform and upgrade its business model but failed to find a clear direction," Feng Lin, an analyst at the China E-Commerce Research Center, told the Global Times Monday.

"Suning's new service is obviously a marketing ploy to attract customers' attention. But attracting more customers to its physical stores is one thing, transforming customer flows to real value is another," Feng said.

Suning reported a first-quarter loss of 433 million yuan ($69.33 million), compared with a profit of 492.8 million yuan one year ago.

The Shenzhen-listed company also closed 32 stores on the Chinese mainland, two in Hong Kong and two in Japan in the first quarter. Together with newly opened stores, Suning had a total of 1,604 stores at home and overseas by the end of March.

Suning, which traditionally competes with another bricks-and-mortar retailer GOME Electrical Appliances Holdings that reported a first-quarter profit of 268 million yuan, has been under pressure from the rising popularity of online shopping.

Its new rivals include jd.com, China's second-largest online retailer by market share, which filed for a $1.5 billion IPO in January, and Alibaba, China's largest e-commerce group, which filed for a $1 billion IPO in US earlier this month.

The company has been forced to diversify its business and expand into areas such as e-commerce, insurance and Internet finance.

"The biggest rival of Suning is neither GOME, Alibaba nor jd.com but itself. It needs to reposition itself and think of a way to properly integrate its off-line and online business," Feng said.