The world’s largest network of beacon devices has emerged in China, consisting of 110,000 units run and managed by Sensoro. The network spans 25 movie theater complexes, sixteen airports, 39 high-end retail stores, 40 major tourist destinations, 200 universities, 260 high speed trains, 1,500 Pizza Hut restaurants, and 2,100 Chow Tai Fook (CTF) jewelry retail stores among other locations.
During the 2015 Chinese New Year (February), traffic at these beacon outfitted locations reached the hundreds of millions. An estimated 12 million visitors visited the 40 Class 4A (four out of five rating by the Tourist Attraction Rating society of China), while more than 300 million passengers rode on the 260 CRH trains to their holiday destinations. Chow Tai Fook, the largest jewelry stores by market share in mainland China with annual sales of over 11 billion dollars, owns more than 2,100 stores. Key co-operations in digital marketing have significantly expanded public exposure to beacon devices in mainland China, building momentum for further innovations in the applications for iBeacon.
During over the Chinese New Year, Chow Tai Fook’s use of iBeacon brought in 11 million dollars in revenue with a coupon conversion rate of up to 63%, far surpassing expectations (Source: CTF 2015 annual earnings). The success of the case persuaded CTF to deploy beacons in all 2,100 of their mainland China retail stores over the next three months, providing an excellent model of digital marketing for other companies including Real Madrid, Sony Pictures Television, and Yum Brands to adopt.
In May 2015, in cooperation with China's largest traditional television media outlet, CCTV News Channel, and the China National Tourism Administration, Sensoro deployed more than 4,200 beacons at 40 scenic attractions. The use of iBeacon technology created the first instance of cooperation between traditional television media and the tourist destinations in mainland China. CCTV’s high-density live broadcasting reached over 12 million tourists and uploaded more than 60,000 high-value real-time news clues. The large number of obtained real news clues led to crack down on illegal tour guides.
With the growing number beacon ecosystems, Sensoro began working on ways to further develop a network to link all 110,000 deployed sensors. An array of information gathering capabilities spread across of network of hundreds of thousands of devices when integrated into an effective platform will create further possibilities for data analysis. In retail situations, the accumulation of data will allow retailers to target customers with an ever increasing accuracy, making personalized, on-location discounts a reality.
With the recent advent of iBeacon and Eddystone technology in large-scale enterprise cases, industries such as retail are just beginning to enjoy the implications of beacon deployment. Due to the scale of enterprise deployment and generally long cycles of the retail business, the initial impact of applying big data digital marketing solutions is not representative of what can be achieved down the road. As customers become more accustomed to interacting with the technology year on year, the accelerated rise in data accumulation will also increase the relevance and accuracy of data analysis. New takes on data analysis will also provide avenues for entirely new applications outside of targeted discounts and consumer profiling. For example, it is hoped that the platform will be able to achieve more efficient methods of inventory stocking, by predicting what customers will need, reducing productions costs for manufacturers.
