SHENZHEN, Jan 28, 2010 (SinoCast Daily Business Beat via COMTEX) -- Chinese telecom carriers have stepped up their 3G marketing push since early this year while the 3G applications are expected to play a leading role in siphoning high-end users.
Nowadays it is crucial for telecom operators to carry a feature-jammed, computer-like handset to do battle in the high-end market, as did China Unicom (SHSE: 600050), the carrier of Apple's iPhone in China.
China Unicom saw its 3G subscribers increase 920,000 to 2.742 million in December 2009 several months since it introduced iPhone.
Excluding 3G card users, China Unicom's newly-added 3G subscribers reached 888,300 in December, jumping 48% compared with 600,000 in November.
The staggering growth reflects that China Unicom, the smaller one of the three Chinese telecom carriers, has trailed a blaze between China Mobile Ltd. (SEHK: 0941, NYSE: CHL) and China Telecom (SEHK: 0728, NYSE: CHA).
China Telecom took the inside track shortly after China issued the 3G licenses last year and generated plenty of buzz for its eSurfing 3G service. It flooded the country with eSurfing commercials, putting its peers at a serious competitive disadvantage.
Meanwhile, with the backing of the government, China Mobile, the carrier of China's homemade 3G standard TD-SCDMA, also took a strong toehold in the 3G market.
Over time, China Unicom's WCDMA 3G service is increasingly gaining popularity for WCDMA has a better, recognized brand recognition outside China.
Yan Ping, an analyst from Guosen Securities, expects China Unicom to add 1.3 million new 3G users on average each month this year.
The year of 2010 is seen as the watershed for 3G carriers, so the competition for the 3G market will be fiercer this year.
To win the battle, they have been going out of their way to offer incentives and subsidies and tap into markdowns. By now China's 3G mobile phone users have topped 10 million. And the latest numbers from Sino Market Research indicate that by November 2009 China's 3G mobile phone sales reached 1.176 million sets.
China Unicom lately launched a new campaign to lure high-end customers by allowing them to make payment by installments.
Yang Xiaowei, vice general manager of China Telecom, said in the company's annual confab that they would come up with more high-end mobile phones, especially those priced between CNY 1,000 and CNY 2,000. But they would not subsidize mobile phones with sticker prices under CNY 1,000, added the general manager.
The main push of China Unicom these days also covers the soon-to-be-launched, iPhone-style handset called UPhone and Unistore, its own online application store.
(USD 1 = CNY 6.83)
