eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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Mobile social networking services (SNS) has been developing for several years and its growth speed has been accelerating in recently. This fact, thus, has crucial meaning to the mobile ecosystem participants and the users. It is especially true for the mobile operators, who exclusively control the 3G network. This arising environment provides much more opportunities and challenges than ever before and how operators can capture the value from mobile SNS would be a problem.

The research purpose of this paper is to provide suggestions to Chinese operators’ business models to capture value from mobile SNS, after understanding and analyzing useful information about the business model in Japan and UK.

This paper begins with the concept introduction and discussion. Then in the literature review part, the business model ontology specified by Osterwalder (2002) is conducted. To better comply with the telecom industry, external factors that may influence the business model are adjusted into the ontology.

After the literature review, it is the empirical study part, which adopts case study and interviews as the main research methodologies. Here, the business models of operators in China, Japan and the UK are analyzed respectively.

Finally, based on the key findings of business models, the managerial suggestions are given to Chinese operators: operator should focus on the customers’ needs; analyze and collect customer information; utilize Operators’ advantages, create unique SNS services; Be a smart pipe and ensure network capacity; choose the most popular SNS providers as the partner; If necessary, investing to SNS with huge potential is also a practical way.