China Mobile's dream in the capital market is to gradually list all provincial branches and merge them into China Mobile (Hong Kong) Company, with China Mobile (Hong Kong) as the main operating entity and its parent company China Mobile Communications Group as the holding company.
In addition, China Mobile needs to raise more funds to expand in order to maintain its market share. The most urgent task is to solve the problem of how to transition to 3G.
In fact, after China Unicom adopted CDMA as the second-generation and half-technology for the transition to 3G, China Mobile is increasingly caught in a dilemma. If follow-up tactics are adopted, China Mobile needs to fully open its GPRS network and compete with Unicom's GSM network, but this is a costly project. The first phase project of China Unicom has already spent 25 billion yuan, and it is said that it will cost more than 70 billion yuan after completion. The cost of GPRS may not be lower than this. Therefore, a person from China Mobile said privately that China Mobile's operation in the capital market mainly revolves around its subsidiary, China Mobile (Hongkong), with the purpose of raising funds to compete with China Unicom and consolidate its share in the China mobile communication market. The operation of the parent company, China Mobile Group, in the secondary market in the Mainland is not the focus.
The most important thing: GPRS?
The annual report of China Mobile (HK) released on March 18 shows that China Mobile has excellent performance, with the number of users increasing by 54%, but the fly in the ointment is that the growth rate is lower than 75% in 2000. As for the mainland mobile phone market share, it also dropped from 77.5% in 2000 to 72.4% last year, and the squeezed 5% share naturally belongs to Unicom. This undoubtedly sounded the alarm for China Mobile: Unicom is pressing hard. In particular, China Unicom opened a CDMA network. As a transition technology to 3G, China Mobile is faced with a choice.
China Mobile initially chose to develop 3G from GSM to GPRS and then WCDMA. GPRS refers to the general packet switching technology (GPRS), which is one of the 2.5 generation technologies in the transition from GSM to WCDMA. China Mobile officially started the first phase of GPRS project in September 2000. By July last year, the first phase of the project with a capacity of 400,000 users was opened in 25 cities in 16 province and entered the trial commercial stage.
China Mobile was originally prepared to make great efforts for GPRS, and announced that China is about to enter the era of 2.5 generation mobile communication. However, after the introduction of GPRS, we actually encountered many problems.
The selling point of GPRS is data service, but in China, mobile phones are obviously only used for talking. It is doubtful whether wireless data service can bring economic benefits quickly. The WAP mobile Internet project launched by China Mobile is a failed example.
In addition, there are many technical problems. For example, GPRS data service needs to occupy a large number of communication channels between the base station and the user's mobile phone. A call only needs to occupy one channel, while a data service theoretically needs to occupy eight channels. This is a big problem for China Mobile, which is short of frequency resources.
Moreover, with Datang and Siemens recently announcing the success of TD-SCDMA 3G mobile communication system test, China Mobile needs to carefully consider whether to directly access TD-SCDMA and jump to 3G in one step, or to transition to 3G through GPRS, a 2.5G technology, according to the established steps.
TD-SCDMA technology is very advanced, and the total investment is relatively low, almost half that of WCDMA. But the problem is that China Mobile has invested a lot of money in GPRS. If we don't continue, at least billions will be wasted.
It is understood that after March, the Ministry of Information Industry will make unified arrangements for the evaluation of TD-SCDMA, WCDMA and C DMA2000, so that China Mobile and China Unicom can make a decision on how to move to 3G. But the latest news is that China Mobile has made a choice: it will launch GPRS network in May.
It is reported that this choice is made because China Mobile has solved most technical problems after more than one year of trial commercial use. In addition, the developed TD-SCDMA technology is unstable and it is difficult to guarantee foolproof quality. Therefore, GPRS is still the best choice for China Mobile against Unicom CDMA. (