An In-Depth Analysis of China’s Mobile Phone Market

A big number of China-specific mobile industry news has been cropping up of late. When it comes to the players — wireless carriers, handset manufacturers, device makers — obviously both local and foreign parties will find the market tremendously attractive. We won’t be surprised reading major headlines telling that the executives of tech world’s biggest firms – Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nokia’s Stephen Elop and even Cisco’s John Chambers — visiting the country last month.

(Photo Credit: ShutterStock)

Let us explore the most populous country’s mobile market size, service providers, architectures, handset manufacturers and retail stores.

Market Size

China is the world’s biggest mobile telephone market. With more than 1 billion mobile phone subscribers – or around 74% of its total population — it’s a relatively huge market, compared to other regions. About 14% of this market uses a 3G-supported device. Mobile phones have become an indispensable tool for modern communication in the country. Mobile is the most profitable sub-sector of the telecommunications industry.

The 1 billion figure actually includes both analog and digital handsets. The predominance of cellular phones over fixed telephones is due to the lack of landline density at the time cellular systems began maturing. And as digital cellular technology superseded older analog cellular systems, existing wireless carriers have been able to pack more subscribers onto existing networks, without additional spectrum allocations needed (such as via code division instead of time-division access). In addition to that, 38% of internet users access online services solely from their mobile devices, in lieu of wireline internet connectivity or broadband. 45% of them live in rural areas compared to 29% that reside in urban metropolises.

2011 has been the glorious year of the smartphone in China, where iPhones, iPads, Android devices and other tablet computers became hot topics on search engines and in people’s daily lives. Looking back on that year, it seems like everyone in China has already started holding a big screen phone or tablet on the subway, at restaurants, even while waiting for red lights.

Carriers

The market is led by three domestic companies, China Mobile (GSM and TD-SCDMA), China Unicom (GSM and WCDMA) and China Telecom (GSM and WCDMA). At this point, their market share is 65.5 percent, 20.1 percent and 12.6 percent, respectively, competing for a US$ 90 billion industry annually. Other, smaller, carriers are China Satcom and China Voice Holdings Corp. Yes, you read it right. All carriers are exclusively China-based companies and the government has the majority ownership of all of them. Of course, they do.

Last year, China Mobile and Clearwire announced plans to roll out a TD-LTE network. The company will have more than 20,000 TD-LTE base stations going live this year, and 200,000 up and running by the end of 2013. Hangzhou and Shenzhen are two cities expected to have full TD-LTE coverage of their urban areas at its early stage.

Network Architectures

Back in 2006, the Ministry of Information Industry announced that Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA) would be the country’s 3G standard. The ministry is the primary regulator of communications not merely telecommunications but radio, film and television too. A year after, they approved European WCDMA and American CDMA2000 standards for use in 3G networks and set the target to deploy it before 2008 Beijing Olympics.

In 2009, the ministry gave its regulatory nod by assigning TD-SCDMA licenses to China Mobile, W-CDMA and CDMA2000 1xEV-DO to China Unicom and China Telecom respectively.

Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Nortel and Siemens are acknowledged as the leading international suppliers of their network equipment.

Mobile Phone Brands

The story starts after joining WTO, during which China signed the Information Technology Agreement (ITA) seven years ago. This eliminated tariffs on all information technology products, including wireless handsets. One of the consequences is that foreign handset makers have no tariff barriers limiting their sales in China. Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson were the top brands that dominated at that time.

The country itself has been a place where mobile phone manufacturers source most of their production. Almost all of mobile manufacturing contracts are in China. You can name it: Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Philips, BlackBerry, Apple — all are made in China. In 2011 alone, 550 million handsets, using either GSM or CDMA technology, were produced in China. 404 million units were exported. It accounted for 52% of the production across the globe that year.

BBK, Haier, Kejian, Konka, Lenovo, Meizu, Ningbo Bird, TCL, Xiaomi, TCE and Huawei are the nation local players. As a side note for Huawei, they have been recently selected as the most admired companies in Asia-Pacific by Fortune Magazine. As of writing, Samsung, Nokia, HTC, Motorola and Apple are the leading smartphone brands ranked by attention rate.

Apple has yet to tap the market, although China Mobile has stated that it has over 10 million unofficial iPhone users on its network. Again, the announcement of TD-LTE implementation will be significant, as the iPhone is not currently available on this 4G standard due to incompatibilities. Other principals — like ZTE, which recently announced two Android 4.0 phones – are reportedly waiting for more efficient LTE chipsets to become available, as well as for LTE networks to mature before launching LTE-equipped devices.

According to ZDC, last year’s mobile phone price trends in the China are as follow.

Mobile Phone Price Trends in the Chinese Market 2011

According to the same source, 3.3 inch to 4.0 inch mobile phone screen sizes are the first choice among the users, accounting for 41.3%, followed by 2.9 inch to 3.2 inch with 25.1%.

Retail Outlets

Mobile phones are sold via stand-alone cellular stores, department stores and home appliance chain stores. Only few of them are sold online. There are about 90,000 dedicated retail phone stores, which are rapidly expanding from the cities to the more rural regions to reach more consumers.

Wrap Up

The market will continue to grow, driven by increasing purchases of high-end smartphones with advanced features in urban coast areas, combined with increasing penetration of lower-cost handsets in rural regions.

Moreover, the forthcoming launch of the 4G LTE standard in 2014 is very well anticipated, as operators are keen to move beyond their existing networks to cope with the upsurge in data and voice load. This is likely to trigger another wave of handset purchases, as existing users upgrade to phones that leverage the broadband network’s ability to provide better quality of service in mobile audio, video, games, and data.

As published in TechWireAsia: http://www.techwireasia.com/2733/an-in-depth-analysis-of-chinas-mobile-phone-market/

China World’s Biggest Mobile Subscriber Population, But Still Has Plenty of Room to Grow

China has become the first country in the globe to have more than 1 billion mobile phone subscribers, according to government statistics. It has reached 951.6 million October last year with additional 39 million users per quarter. Based on that and recent growth rates, the total number of users has surpassed a billion sometime during this month. We can say it’s around 74 percent of its total population — 1.35 billion people — owns a mobile phone.

One of the first customers who queued up to purchase a new smartphone iPhone 4S show his new phone at an Apple Store Friday Jan. 13, 2012 in Shanghai, China. Mobile subscribers in China have breached the 1 billion mark, although the country is still said to have room to grow, in terms of mobile broadband speeds and penetration. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

China Has the World’s Top Mobile Phone Population

The figures underscore the soaring rate of mobile phone adoption in the country. In March three years ago, the country had 670 million mobile phone users. During the same period in 2010, that number reached 776 million. China Mobile, the country’s largest telecommunications company, has the biggest market share with 67.3 percent, followed by China Unicom with 20.1 percent and China Telecom, the smallest of the three operators, have 12.6 percent share.

A point to note is that China Mobile has been listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) marked them as the first company from China to be included in the list. In 2004, International Telecommunications Union (ITU) ranked China Mobile first among the top ten mobile operators by proportionate subscribers.

India Catching Up

While China maintains itself as the country with the most mobile phone users, India is catching up, with the growth rate of telecommunication sector continued to enjoy an impressive growth. The wireless subscription base has recorded an increase of 227.27 million, thus makes it a total base of 893.84 million connections according to a recent report from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. The overall teledensity registered an increase from 52.74 at the end of March 2010 to 70.89 at the end of March 2011.

China’s 3G networks, which launched three years ago, added around 15 million new subscribers over the first two months of 2012. This puts them on track to surpass its 2011 3G network growth rate, which made around 135 million subscribers in the nation by now. Many analysts and parties have concluded that China’s smartphone sales have driven the force in the increase of 3G subscribers in the country.

And at the end of last year, China had 440 million users who used mobile devices to go online, an increase from 305 million a year before, as stated by China Internet Network Information Center.

Still Plenty of Room for Growth?

The countries with the most phones per person tend to be small, with lots of borders or numerous foreign workers and visitors, as stated by Susan Teltscher, an analyst at the ITU. If there is a question which country has the most cell phones per person? United Arab Emirates (UAE) with two for each citizen is the answer. Second place goes to Montenegro. Why? Because the visitors tend to buy local phones to use during their stay either for vacation or business trip. With the UAE as a benchmark, mobile phone market in China surely appear to have plenty of room to grow.

As published in TechWireAsia: http://www.techwireasia.com/2118/china-worlds-biggest-mobile-phone-population-but-still-has-plenty-of-room-to-grow/

Asia Pacific CEOs Increasingly Brand & Social Media Aware

Chief Executive Officers in Asia Pacific corporations are found to be more aware of brands, and more likely to respond to social media inputs in their respective businesses. This is based on a study from MEC and CNBC from a survey among 32 CEOs in multinational corporations across China, Hong Kong, Indiaand Singapore.

(Photo credit: Shutterstock)

As these top-level executives are utilizing technology more intensively for information aggregation and time management, CEOs are now willing to take direct control of their own access to communications, business performance and industry news, instead of relying to their personal assistants.

CEOs are often thought to be unreachable, and only accessible through their assistants or secretaries. The average senior business leader frequently “maintains distance” from their business environments to retain their influence, perspective and control.

However, CEOs are now found to actually be more accessible, due to the use of Business-to-Business (B2B) social media as an important tool for company positioning. Only a few APAC executives are identified using the platform for external communications, though — a contrast to their western counterparts.

Jon Wright, MEC Asia Pacific Head of Analytics and Insight, said that the networks are not exactly an effective way of communicating with CEOs due to the “probability of losing control in their communication structures.”

But, they allow internal conversations, in order to help get employees heard. This leads to better transparency within an organization.

Moreover, CEOs are found to be more open to the influence of business contacts when it comes to products and services, such as hotels, airlines, clothing brands and technology. CEOs surveyed said they listen to recommendations from respected media outlets. This is seen as an opportunity for B2B networks to partner with media brands to provide relevant, valuable and timely content.

Still, remains to be the preferred method of communication. A special mention went to Apple for its ethos and CEO achievements as a brand as well as a business principal. The key idea here is that business leaders respond to a new, clear and actionable information at an appropriate time through an appropriate channel.

Wright continues that CEOs are humans, too. “In many ways technology has made them more similar to the everyday person. Brands need to ensure that valuable content is provided that fits in with CEOs’ requirements, and it needs to be effectively ‘liquid’ in order to be accessible via any device.”

As published in TechWireAsia: http://www.techwireasia.com/3534/asia-pacific-ceos-increasingly-brand-social-media-aware/