New Year’s celebrations lead to more mobile spending throughout China

The Lunar New Year has come and gone and mobile commerce surged during the Chinese holiday. During the Lunar New Year, those living in China send one another traditional red packets, called hong bao. These red envelopes typically contain money and is something that many people look forward to receiving every year. With the emergency of mobile technology, the way people give hong bao to one another has changed, which has been good news for mobile commerce in general.

Payment platforms enable consumers to send and receive hong bao efficiently

Both WeChat and Alipay enable people to deliver hong bao cards to one another. Both platforms have become very popular in China, as they allow people to make purchases and send money to others. These two platforms have allowed mobile shopping to thrive in China and have given their owners, Tencent and Alibaba respectively, a competitive edge over those that would try to enter into China’s mobile commerce market. During the Lunar New Year, the platforms proved to be particularly effective in serving mobile consumers.

The number of hong bao being send through mobile services continues to rise ad mobile payments become more common

According to Tencent, more than 8 billion hong bao cards were exchanged during the Lunar New Year. This is eight times more than the number of hong bao that were sent last year. This is actually a trend that has been seen over the past few years. More consumers are becoming mobile-centric, which is making them more comfortable with the concept of mobile payments and how their devices can be used to connect with one another.

China continues to be an attractive mobile commerce market for many

This year, the hong bao may highlight the growing importance of mobile payments systems, as well as their value. During the third quarter of 2015, China’s mobile commerce space was valued at approximately $368 million. The country is considered the fastest growing mobile payments market in the world, attracting the attention of other companies that are in this sector.

As its handset sales remain lower than the Canadian company had hoped, it has slashed 200 jobs.

The restructuring strategy at BlackBerry has been continuing and, on the heels of a job cut affecting 200 people, the struggling Canadian handset manufacturing is now directing its attention toward software.

The company barely has any mobile device models left on the market shelves and their sales simply aren’t cutting it.

Because of this, BlackBerry appears to be shifting its focus in order to send its resources in the direction of mobile apps for consumers and services for businesses – areas in which the company has managed to excel, over the years. The market share of global smartphone sales currently held by the Canadian mobile device maker is a measly 0.3 percent (as of the third quarter of 2015), according to data from Gartner. That said, when it comes to business security software and other forms of applications, the brand is managing to steadily improve its position.

Even the switch that BlackBerry made to Android does not appear to have been enough to boost its smartphone sales.

John Chen, CEO of the company, announced that the company didn’t intend to step away from hardware and, as a part of that strategy, the company released the Priv smartphone, which was based on Android instead of on its own proprietary operating system. The hope was that the more popular mobile platform, in combination with the exponentially larger availability of mobile apps, would be enough to draw consumers back to the brand. Unfortunately, while it did see an increase in sales, it doesn’t look as though it was enough to rescue its hardware business.

The device, itself, is quite unique, and it isn’t difficult to see why the company would feel that it had draw for consumers. Its large 5.4 inch touchscreen also offered a slide-out physical keyboard, for users who would prefer the ease of a mechanical way to type. Its 18 megapixel primary camera (which also allows for 4K video recordings) featured autofocus and an image stabilizer. It is NFC technology enabled and offers about 22 hours of battery with standard device usage. It also comes pre-loaded with security and privacy apps. Its retail US price is $699.

That said, while it doesn’t look like BlackBerry has reached the point where it is phasing its smartphones out of production, predictions look as though its hardware options are going to become slimmer as the year progresses.