China Mobile gears up for Android and $8.6bn spend
Published: 12 January, 2009
READ MORE: China Mobile
The wireless industry is gearing up for China's 3G roll-out, and it seems that the country's three newly licensed operators will more than fulfil the hopes of forecasters in terms of spend, with the total for 2009 alone potentially topping $30bn on infrastructure. China Mobile says it will spend $8.6bn in 2009, and is also preparing to unveil its first Android-based smartphone.
The company has a headstart on China Telecom and China Unicom because it was allowed to start its build early, to support the Beijing Olympic Games, and because it is already a convincing mobile market leader, but it has been forced to use the unproven Chinese technology TD-SCDMA, and it has fewer wireline and converged resources than its rivals. So it has reiterated plans to invest heavily over the next two years, even introducing LTE at an early stage, to make up for these disadvantages and keep its lead.
The first step will be to deploy about 60,000 base stations in 238 cities this year, in addition to the 20,000 already installed for the Olympics and for trial networks around major metro areas. Locally based research company CCID Consulting predicts that there will be 51m TD-SCDMA subscribers by 2011, while the government believes the total 3G build-out will cost about $30bn this year and another $11bn in 2010. China currently has about 634m mobile users.
The biggest challenge for China Mobile is getting competitive prices and, even more importantly, a competitive range of attractive handsets, for a 3G technology for which it is the only customer, while Unicom and Telecom can tap into the mainstream markets for W-CDMA and CDMA2000. Hence its early move into the high profile Android game, with the South China Morning Post reporting that the much anticipated OPhone will be launched on the initial TD-SCDMA networks during this quarter.
Lenovo Mobile is expected to be the first developer of a Chinese Android handset, implementing a customized, Chinese language version of the operating system co-created with China Mobile. The operator is expected to push further down the route of evolving its own Android-based software platform to take full advantage of local applications needs and the characteristics of TD-SCDMA. At least six phonemakers are expected to release Android phones for the Chinese network this year, while Nokia is the first non-Chinese manufacturer to work with Mobile on 3G smartphones, though its models, of course, will run Symbian/Series 60.
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