China Subscriber Additions Overtakes India

Despite the shortness of the month, February 2007 was another record breaking month for the Chinese mobile market as net additions climbed to a new all-time high of 6.378m. The performance takes the run of such months to six, with a new record being set in each month since September 2006. The monthly figure implies a current daily connection rate in China of 228k, which means that in February, China once again claimed the mantle of the world's fastest growing market (in absolute terms) from India, which had trumped it in each of the preceding six months.

The consistent month-on-month improvements in China are surely not coincidental. It may be concluded that both of the incumbent operators are becoming increasingly aware that their duopoly days are numbered, and are acting (albeit in a rather limited fashion) to grab customers before the launch of their 3G competitors. Alternatively, perhaps the acceleration is merely an indication of China's growing economy, and the ever increasing accessibility of mobile communications to its populus: in its 2006 annual results release China Mobile disclosed that it alone has almost a quarter of a million base stations in its home market, giving unprecedented coverage.

Both China Mobile and China Unicom enjoyed a record breaking February, with the market leader adding 4.90m customers and its smaller competitor 1.48m. In fact net additions at China Unicom broke records in both the CDMA and GSM parts of the customer base, with CDMA adds up to a best-ever 395,000 in February, and GSM adds reaching 1.079m. However, even this performance was not enough to stop Unicom losing more market share to its larger rival and ending the month with just 32.1% of the national total - the lowest proportion it has held since September 2002.

In total there were just over 456m mobile connections in China at the end of February 2007, up almost 70m from the end of the same month in 2006. Of these, 37.6m were CDMA connections, representing 8.27% of the total, and the remaining 418.5m were GSM. To put the market in some perspective, China alone accounted for just under one sixth of the world's mobile connections at the end of 2006, and 42.5% of those in the entire Asia Pacific region - and the market is still only just over one third penetrated. What is more, the number of customers in the Chinese market as at 31st December exceeded the number in the entire Caribbean and Latin America region by 44%, the Middle East & Africa by 61% and North America by 76%.

In the world of mobile communications, as in the worlds of economics and politics, there can be no doubting the importance of China.

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 28th March 2007