China Mobile (CHL), the largest mobile service provider in China, has taken one step forward to becoming a comprehensive wireless service provider with licensing approval to create and execute its own mobile advertising and marketing services.

China Mobile seriously began to explore the mobile advertising market in March 2007 when it asked mobile media firm Fractalist to become an agent for its advertisement design and the engineering of the home page of its Monternet and other channels.

Its services will focus on many different patterns of mobile advertising, including sending advertisements to clients' mobile phones through service providers, embedding graphical advertisements on webpages on its own advertising network, providing ringtones, and creating interactive marketing games. It plans to create a comprehensive mobile advertising and marketing division that will allow advertisers to deal directly with it, instead of going through third-party mobile marketing service providers.

Zhou Yi, director of China Mobile's Olympics Office, has told local media that mobile advertisement is part of China Mobile's value-added services. Zhou said that China Mobile has set up several value-added service divisions recently, which include a flow media base in Shanghai, a mobile music base in Chengdu and a location service base in Tianjin.