Breaking: DeNA, Japanese Leading Mobile Social Networks Buying Chinese Tianxia

In this post our editor published a month ago, we were asking DeNA: What does an advanced Japanese mobile commerce and entertainment provider do in China? Despite Wang Yong, CEO of DeNA China was telling us:

We (DeNA) will not be able to copy our success. We are here to meet friends and share insights. This market is very different so we need new ideas for China.

Today, we obviously have the answer: DeNA, the biggest mobile social network in Japan and currently has 632 employees with a market cap of USD1.5 billion, has entered a tentative (not final) agreement to take a majority stake in WapTX, the owner company of the leading mobile SNS Tianxia (天下网) in China.

Tianxia, the leading Chinese mobile SNS is reported over 30million registered users and 1million active users daily. DeNA has around 14.2 million users in Japan and 18 billion page views per month. It sounds like a win-win deal. Also note that Tianxia was invested by Infinity Venture which is from Japan, this deal is not that surprising, I guess.

Another giant from Japan Mixi has its office set up for quite a while, but its Chinese version still keeps very low key. Mixi is facing a very tough market in China, Social Networking. But for DeNA, the story might be different since the Chinese mobile market just reborn because of 3G and Japan has very advanced mobile industry and loads of experience in running a mobile service.

Welcome, DeNA! We are looking forwards to some fresh ideas from Japan mobile web.

July 3, 2009 · Filed Under China Web2, Japan

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What does an advanced Japanese mobile commerce and entertainment provider do in China?

Yesterday night at Mobile Monday Beijing #29 Wang Yong, CEO of DeNA China shared with us his humble plans for China. I say humble as Wang must have mentioned 3 times during his presentation that replicating DeNA’s extremely successful Japanese services in China is impossible. Before I will describe why Wang did not expect DeNA to do very well in China I will briefly introduce DeNA.

DeNA?
DeNA is the biggest mobile social network in Japan. Currently it has 632 employees with a market cap of USD1.5 billion. Their most popular service is called Mobile Game Town (Mobagetown), a service that primarily attracts users by offering free games and that monetizes through advertising. Other services of DeNA include several successful m-commerce related portals such as Mobaoku (mobile C2C), Pocket Affiliate (Japans largest mobile advertising affiliate network), Mobagetown L (services targeted at Ladies) and Mobakore (fashion retail, 79% female users). DeNA has around 14.2 million users in Japan that are good for 18 billion page views per month.

As one of DeNA’s most popular services Mobagetown was launched back in 2006 it offered games for free. As a result users were rather young at that time: over 70% were teenagers. This has changed in the last few years, currently over 60% of DeNA users are over 20 years old which means they can spend money and are worth more to advertisers. DeNA has over 500,000 partner sites to advertise to mobile users. Wong explains that, among others, advertisers can place ads on the front-page, place text ads between search results, and advertise through (mobile) mail. Moreover Mobagetown has partnerships with big brands to integrate their brand in the service. For instance users could at some point get a Coca Cola avatar. Read more

June 9, 2009 · Filed Under China, Japan, Mobile 2.0, Social Media