China Mobile fires up metaverse with alliance partners

The metaverse looks to be making a return in Asia, with China Mobile announcing a metaverse partner program to drive development.

Before the Chat GPT craze came along late last year the metaverse and its prospects had captured the attention of a number of Asian tier 1 players.

SK Telecom remains out in front with its Ifland platform, which it formally took global early this year. It has signed MoUs with several other operators, notably Deutsche Telekom and Malaysia's Axiata, although so far none has gone commercial.

In its Q1 result in May, the company said 10% of monthly active users (MAUs) were from outside Korea.

Japan's NTT Docomo announced last October it planned to invest some $400 million in the metaverse. With parent company NTT it set up a subsidiary, Qonoq, and metaverse platform XR World. But a spokesperson told Light Reading last month it had no new developments to report.

Operator interest has been rekindled following the recent flurry of hardware announcements, headlined by the unveiling of Apple's Vision Pro XR headset, due to debut next year, and Meta's Quest 3 MR/VR device.

So it perhaps didn't surprise anyone to see China Mobile announce the formation of its metaverse industry alliance – effectively, its own ecosystem – at MWC Shanghai last week, with 29 members including Huawei, Xiaomi, state-owned Mango TV and AI firm iFlytek.

Metaverse investment fund

Liu Xin, the head of China Mobile's content subsidiary Migu, said the operator would invest in copyright protection, marketing support and R&D, with investment to double over the next three years. Additionally, it has set up a metaverse investment fund to provide financing for alliance members.

China went through a metaverse boom in 2021-22, with internet giants, telcos, device-makers and private equity tipping cash into the sector. Total investment last year reached 12.8 billion Chinese yuan (US$1.8 billion).

But the industry has been in retreat for much of 2022, with firms like Tencent and Bytedance cutting staff and abandoning some of their plans. China telcos have not reported fresh metaverse investments in 2023, but they also have not cut back on their ambitions.

The difference is likely not just their business aspirations for the metaverse, but their locked-in role in running the infrastructure that keeps it humming. The central government has tasked telcos with the central role in building and operating China's "computing power networks," – the network connectivity, storage and compute to support China's AI, cloud and other online business.

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As Gao Tongqing, China Mobile executive vice president, pointed out at MWC last week, computing and connectivity infrastructure are at the core of the digital economy, and the growth of the digital economy is closely related to the scale of that infrastructure.

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— Robert Clark, contributing editor, special to Light Reading