Global Supply Chain Council, one of our oldest partners, published a piece recently about the situation of WMS software in China.

The author of the piece which its title is "The WMS industry comes to China" mentions a number of examples which show that WMS is becoming a good market for related vendors:

- Couple of months ago (I also covered this), Catalyst announced its plans to market WMS systems in China after noticing high volumes of Chinese traffic on its website. A few weeks later, Catalyst was acquired by CDC Software, a subsidiary of CDC Corporation, a Chinese-owned provider of enterprise software solutions.

- Hongxun, a big third party logistics provider in China is implementing the WMS along with wireless communications and RF-based bar code scanning to capture and communicate tracking and tracing information, to manage warehouse operations, and to manage the transfer of goods between warehouses. The system will be up and running in 2008. HighJump Software could bit the competitors and sell its package to them.

- National Retail Systems. Along with a Chinese partner, NRS is launching SinoNRS to build and operate highly-automated western-style distribution centers to do value-added services and direct-to-store delivery from China to retail stores in the United States.

Do you think these are the signs of a big trend? I myself think there is a potential in Chinese WMS market but it will take at least 4-5 years for the market to becomes big enough for major players. Till then, the situation is excellent for small and mid-size system providers to jump in.