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Ovum Melbourne analyst, Claudio Castelli, says Chinese SMEs are price-sensitive and more likely to adopt managed and hosted services in order to avoid up-front capital investments, but recommends caution when looking at market expectations.
"Even in China, economic growth is slowing considerably. At some stage it is likely that cash-strapped SMEs will look to cut costs and that budgets may not be converted into actual spend.”
However, Castelli says that mobility is growing fast among SMEs in China, with currently six percent of their employees having some degree of mobility, although he suggests this high level of mobility is not yet reflected in expenditure on mobile services.
“As is the case in most Asian countries, SMEs in China don’t supply mobile devices to their employees. Mobile users supply and support their own personal mobile devices when at work.”
“We believe this practice has a high degree of risk for the business”, added Castelli, but he said, however this scenario is likely to change, as SMEs expect their expenditure to grow more on mobile services than on fixed services.
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