China Focuses on Mobile Internet

Is China going to beat India in the IT outsourcing trade? Yes, says Wang Wenjing, chairman of UFsoft, the largest enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor in China. UFsoft has 4,000 employees in China and serves about 300,000 clients, according to Wang. With its current 2.8 million college graduates and 290 million mobile phones — compared to 80 million Internet connections — going mobile is the most obvious direction to take. Wang: “Chinese users are not that much used to the PC and a keyboard as the users in the U.S. are; we have a very different historical background.”

China’s software developers will focus more so than India on those mobile solutions, he says. Games already are the largest mobile business in China, and that will only expand. Wang: “India was 10 years earlier than China, but we will catch up in the competition with India.” He spoke at ATRE, the Asian Technology Roundtable Exhibition, this week in Shanghai.