Aust subsidiary sells mobile phone games to China

Games software vendor TelcoGames Australia has cut a deal with Telstra-owned carrier Hong Kong CSL to supply Java-based mobile phone games to its client base.

TelcoGames -- a subsidiary of Melbourne company Healthpoint Technologies -- has agreed to supply 50 Java games to CSL via CSL's website and WAP portal. CSL's Hong Kong-based post-paid customers would download the games online via their mobile phones.

Mick Leahy, general manager at TelcoGames Australia, said the deal was the games aggregator and publisher's first in Hong Kong or China. The company came to Australia about a year ago with a view to targeting Asia.

“We wanted to bring all the European games into the Asian market a lot quicker than they were being made available here,” he said.

Leahy said Australia had been about 12 months behind Europe in handsets and technology but the downloads and handsets were starting to come through now. Most handsets today were Java-enabled, he said.

The deal would also enable TelcoGames to target customers of China Mobile and China Unicom via CSL, which Leahy said had similar status to Optus or Vodafone here. “It allows us ... to start to access the mobile market within the People's Republic of China,” Leahy said.

Leahy said he could not estimate how much revenue the Hong Kong deal might be worth to TelcoGames in the first year until some initial figures came in. However, there were potentially millions of customers for the games in China, he said.

Australian developers were providing some “real Montys” to the mobile phone games market, and TelcoGames found it a boon to work with the talent here, Leahy added.

TelcoGames earns a percentage of the price paid by customers when they download each game. Other terms of the deal are confidential, parent company Healthpoint said in a statement.

ASX-listed Healthpoint Technologies provides health and drug information via its customer counselling and staff training software to pharmacies.

TelcoGames is also part-owned by TelcoGames in Europe.