Chinese service providers (SPs) showed an unprecedented collective consciousness in forming a professional organization yesterday in Beijing, in an effort to cope with the decline of wireless value-added services.

More than 30 SPs met in the Chinese capital and set up the Wireless Information Service Professional Committee of the Internet Society of China.

Almost all major Chinese SPs including NASDAQ-listed Sina, Sohu, Netease, Kongzhong, Tom Online and Hong Kong-listed Tencent, joined the committee.

Gao Lulin, vice-chairman of the society and director of the committee said the purpose of the committee is to strengthen self-discipline of SPs in content and services.

The organization will monitor and test services of members and give a China Trusted Wireless Service certificate to those qualified.

China's top three Internet portals Sina, Sohu and Netease, which have been competing severely in past years, showed great enthusiasm for the organization this time, after they formed two alliances in the past three months. But the Internet Society and the three companies have decided to expand the range of alliance and established the committee.

"We are very concerned if this business will still exist in three or five years, so we must seriously consider our customers ," said Charles Zhang, chairman and CEO of Sohu and deputy director of the committee.

Since late last year, the Chinese Government and mobile operators have started campaigns to stop the spread of illegal and pornographic content through mobile messages, and forced subscription of services on users without their consent. Many SPs were closed and almost every big player in the market was fined or punished.

Since mobile messages are a core revenue pool for most NASDAQ-listed companies, the campaigns led to a sharp slowdown of mobile business revenues. So the companies wanted to form an organization to discipline themselves as well as show their attitude to the regulators, with the wish that the regulatory campaign will end early.

(China Daily December 31, 2004)