With Half A Billion Cell Phones China Readies High Speed

Written by Adam Gosling

Friday, 24 August 2007

The number of mobile phone accounts in China is set to reach and exceed 500 million this Quarter according to numbers crunched by Wireless Intelligence - the joint venture between Ovum and the GSM Association.  That gives the country a staggering global market share of more than 15% of the world's estimated 3.25 billion mobile phone connections and it's unlikely to stop there. With quarterly growth averaging around 4%, China is adding around 19 million cellular connections each quarter and current market penetration is only at 35%. The country has the Olympics coming up in July 2008 and regulators are in discussions about the introduction of new high-speed technology in China. The government and the regulatory body are in the process of issuing licences to operators and it looks like a new TD-SCDMA network will be deployed in time for the Olympics. "If China Mobile succeeds, we forecast its TD-SCDMA connections to represent 5% of its total connections by the end of 2010," says Joss Gillet, Senior Analyst at Wireless Intelligence. China Mobile is by far the largest operator with nearly 70% of the market with a strong grip of the prepay market (79%), which accounts for 66% of the total market. The leading operator is growing at an average rate of 5% quarter-on-quarter and 20% year-on-year. In 2007, China Mobile is expected to continue on the same growth trend, says Gillet. There are three phone companies preparing to trial the technology (China Mobile, China Unicom and China Netcom) with the Olympic Games in July 2008 the primary target for launch. China Mobile has invested US$5 billion in the deployment of the new network, says the research and is expected to reach about 5% of its total connections by 2010 and then 100 million connections by 2012, says Gillet. But with half the world's population now using mobile phones according to this Reuters report , the total number of connection is likely to exceed 3.25 billion by the end of this year. This number, based on a report by UK-based researcher The Mobile World (The world's population is estimated at around 6.6 billion). It took more than 20 years from the first mobile phone to connect a billion subscribers, but then just over three years (40 months) to get the second billion. The third billion took just two years. A great deal of this growth is coming in emerging markets such as China and India, with estimates that 65 % of handset sold this year going to these emerging markets. Related news items Telstra Wireless Hits Speed Record -24/09/2007 3 Announces Intent to Launch Devices Based on QUALCOMM's BREW Solution -24/06/2007 Nokia introduces three versatile mobile phones targeted to mid-range market -18/06/2007 Santa Rosa Becomes Centrino -09/05/2007 Q1 #2 -19/03/2007 Newer news items Samsung's New UMPC -06/01/2008 Eee Available Now Comes In Black -01/01/2008 Tiny Rugged UMPC WIth Vista -10/10/2007 Ultra-Mobile Sales Ready To Rocket -16/09/2007 Palm Deletes Foleo Folly -05/09/2007 Older news items Not nano, pico -23/04/2007 Tag This Now: