According to the report, "The Chinese Mobile Security Application Market in Q3, 2014," released by Analysys International, nearly 274 million people in China used mobile security applications in the first three quarters of 2014. The top three applications at the time of this writing are 360 Safeguard, Tencent Steward, and Baidu Safeguard, each holding 50.9%, 40.9% and 23.5% of the market respectively.
The continuous growth of the mobile payment market has become the driving force behind the development of the mobile security software market. Payment security is a serious concern for cell phone manufacturers to sell their devices and therefore, many new security software products are in development. In order to protect users’ mobile payment security, mobile security software developers not only vertically protect the safety of the whole industry, including terminal manufacturers, operators, application developers and other developers, but also actively disseminate mobile security software ecosystems.
The mobile security ecosystem created by Tencent actively encompasses a huge portion of the market, including the three major telecom operators; fifteen mobile phone manufacturers such as Samsung, Xiaomi, and Lenovo; twelve mobile phone applications like SF and shuame.com; forty software markets such as AppChina and myapp. Com; fifteen security software vendors; and more than 100 other partners including the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank and the Shenzhen Police Department. Additionally, in implementing an open platform strategy, Tencent opened security capabilities to all entities in its eco-circle in an effort to realize the full potential of mobile payment security applications. Tencent has also increased its promotional efforts to clients and invited celebrities to enhance their brand awareness.
Baidu Safeguard has built a fully open platform for its three mobile security initiatives: payment security, harassment interception, and virus killing and vulnerability detection. Baidu has started to collaborate with dozens of security agencies, developers, app developers, banks, third-party payment systems, operators and other partners in their eco-circle(software ecosystem?). Baidu’s mobile security open platform will create an interface for an open-source community and genuine alliances, improving their overall mobile security ecosystem.
EnfoDesk and Analysys believe that the competition among Chinese mobile security vendors will transform from competing over technologies and business models into competing over mobile security ecosystems. Vendors that can build an entire mobile security ecosystem based on users’ needs will win out in this new round of competition and these mobile security ecosystems will reshape the competitive landscape of the mobile security market.