Migu to help China Mobile diversify from traditional telecom services
Migu, China Mobile’s entertainment content subsidiary, will cooperate with several renowned partners including BBC and Discovery to offer users various services as the telco seeks to grow its business from traditional telecommunication services.
As they face obstacles in expanding their telecom business, China Mobile, along with China Telecom and China Unicom, is seeking additional value-added business income. Meanwhile, their next growth engine — 5G network — won’t be commercially available until 2020 when China is set to issue the licenses, industry insiders said.
Migu signed an agreement at the weekend with the General Administration of Sports of China, BBC, Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific, Global Mobile World Congress Shanghai and Xiuzheng Group to beef up cooperation on content.
With the new content and partnership, Migu is able to offer more content and services covering sports, fitness, traveling and games to attract young users born after 1990, said Liu Xin, Migu’s chief executive. These extra services will add to the 17 million songs, 4.3 million video clips and 500,000 ebooks online that Migu offers to China Mobile’s 880 million subscribers.
Migu will also invest in new technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality and super high definition 4K contents.
The company also held a Migu Music Award festival during the weekend, which attracted over 134 million online viewers.
Other telcos are also seeking to diversifyand transform their business.
China Unicom is cooperating with Alibaba to test new retail methods while China Telecom is working jointly with Oriental Pearl Group on home entertainment.