Telecoms in China Continue to Shake Up II

June 2nd, 2008

Going to back to my previous article, I started thinking about how this is going to impact the mobile space in China. Like I said before, a mobile company selling off its CDMA unit… that just sounds weird, at least initially.

However, this deal is supposed to help everyone to compete with China Mobile at the end. For those of you who don’t know much about China Mobile, they are actually the world’s largest mobile provider (at least based on the number of subscribers). According to Wikipedia, they have over 380 million subscribers! To put it into perspective, AT&T Wireless “only” has 71.4 million customers. On numbers alone, China Mobile has 5 times more customers than AT&T Wirless.

Anyway, back to China Unicom and China Telecom. AP business writer Jeremiah Marquez wrote:

The deals could help China Unicom and China Telecom compete with the country’s cell phone heavyweight, China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile provider by subscribers. China Telecom could expand its new mobile business with its current fixed-line customers; China Unicom could grow its current mobile business with the new fixed-line subscribers.

It’ll be interesting to see how this race will turn out. Even the Chairman for China Unicom knows that catching China Mobile is going to be hard.

“It’s hard to say when the new company will become the largest mobile operator in China,” he told reporters. “Frankly, I still believe there is a significant gap between the new company and China Mobile.”

Like I said before, it will be very interesting to see how all of this is going to play out.  Just in case you didn’t read the article yet, it’s right here.

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