GSM and W-CDMA Claim 82% of Asia Pacific Market

W-CDMA continued to be Asia's fastest growing technology in Q3 2006 with a proportionate increase in customer numbers of 15.7% over the three months. However, whilst the proportionate growth rate was a new record low - naturally declining as the technology gradually becomes more established on the continent - in absolute terms Q3 2006 was a record quarter for W-CDMA, with a net 5.5m new customers adopting the technology, compared with 4.0m in Q3 2005.

The dominance of Japan in the W-CDMA mix has lessened over the year to 30th September 2006, from 93% to 83% of the total customer base, although this clearly still represents an overwhelming majority.

Australia is the second largest W-CDMA market in Asia Pacific with 2.23m customers and 6% of the total at the end of Q3 2006, all of Hutchison's 2G customers having now been migrated to 3G W-CDMA services. Taiwan and Hong Kong come in third and fourth with 1.78m and 1.15m customers respectively using W-CDMA at the end of the period, accounting for a further 7% of the regional total.

CDMA2000 technology is still far more prevalent in Asia Pacific than W-CDMA, largely thanks to support for the technology by the three South Korean operators, KDDI in Japan, China Unicom in China, and Reliance and Tata in India.

It is worth mentioning that four of these seven businesses are not pure CDMA plays, since they also have GSM/W-CDMA variant networks in operation. Nevertheless, at a regional level there are still more than three times as many CDMA2000 customers as W-CDMA customers in Asia Pacific, despite this ratio dropping from well over four a year earlier. Of the 121.4m total at the end of September 2006, 21.3% were using EV-DO technology compared to 20.2% at the end of September 2005. The reason the increase is only marginal is that neither China Unicom, Reliance nor Tata has yet commercially launched the EV-DO variant of the CDMA2000 technology, and together these three operators accounted for over 70% of the overall customer growth in CDMA2000 in the year to 30th September 2006.

Overall, GSM is still the technology of choice in Asia Pacific.

There were more than three quarters of a billion GSM connections in the region at the end of September 2006 after a 52% increase in numbers in just 21 months; these figures rise to 801m and +57% if W-CDMA customers are also included.

The Japanese proprietary standard PDC is the second largest 2G technology in Asia Pacific by subscribers, with 35.7m connections at the end of Q3 2006. cdmaOne is third in line with just 19.6m customers connected at the end of the third quarter, 1m having disconnected or switched to third generation CDMA services during the period. These figures imply that GSM had a 78% share of the market at the end of September 2006, whilst PDC claimed 4% and cdmaOne 2%. As far as 3G technologies are concerned, W-CDMA claimed a 4% share of the total customer market, whilst CDMA2000 1x and its EV-DO variant accounted for 12%.

This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World. To download a sample issue of the Briefing in PDF format, please click here. For more information including full subscription pricing, please visit The Mobile World"

Posted to the site on 11th January 2007