China's Mobile Economy

Foreword

Some authors are good at spotting and analyzing trends. Others go in deep and provide detailed explanations of how an industry ecosystem or specialized sector is evolving. But in China's Mobile Economy, Winston Ma delivers the rare book that is both an outstanding survey of a fast-changing and vitally important economic landscape and a delightful “field guide” that will enrich your understanding of what's really happening on the ground.

Start with the headline: even those generally aware of the scale of the country's ongoing digital transformation may have missed this news – 2014--15, Ma insists, marks “the most important inflection point in the history of the internet” in China. Almost overnight, the world's largest digitally-connected middle class went both mobile and multi-screen (smartphone, tablets, laptops and more), with huge implications for how consumers behave and what companies need to do to successfully compete.

How have China's Big Three, the group known as “BAT” (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent) responded so effectively to the shift to a mobile platform and how are their business models converging as the lines between e-commerce, social media, and entertainment blur? What does the swift rise of more than 600 million mobile consumers and the rapid merging of online-to-offline shopping (O2O) mean for Western multinationals in traditional industries such as autos and beverages, as well as for digital stalwarts like Apple and aspiring newcomers such as Uber? ...