WS,
My life is counting on QCOM. What is yours? Hopefully it is not Nokia and this SI board. (gg)
Tero,
Now could you tell me that this is not true that ERICY do not provide vendor financing to its customers? Certainly it is not from Nokia.
China Unicom To Spend $843 Mln On CDMA - Newspaper
BEIJING (Reuters) - China Unicom will invest 7.0 billion yuan ($843 million) to build a CDMA mobile phone network to challenge the near monopoly of China Telecom, the China Daily Business Weekly said Sunday.
The U.S.-developed CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) standard was Unicom's ''best shot'' to compete with the entrenched GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) standard of China Telecom, the official newspaper said.
The five-year-old Unicom, the tiny rival to state-owned giant China Telecom with only five percent of China's fast-growing telecoms market, would expand its CDMA networks this year, a senior company official was quoted as saying.
''We will develop a large-scale CDMA network and the feasibility study is under consideration,'' Wang Jianzhou, Unicom's executive vice president, told the China Daily Business Weekly.
Wang credited recent government policy changes with creating a ''favorable operational environment'' for the struggling Unicom.
The newspaper said the Ministry of Information Industry would merge Guoxin Paging Corp, China's largest paging operator, with Unicom.
Guoxin, with 39.5 million customers and assets of 13 billion yuan, would seek a domestic listing this year, it said.
Unicom, plagued by capital shortages in its bid to capture 30 percent share of the market by 2003, was seeking new funding sources in the wake of the government's freezing last year of an investment method called China-China-Foreign (CCF), the report said.
CCF involved injecting capital into a Sino-foreign joint venture, which in turn invested in a Unicom project for a share of the revenues.
Wang said Unicom's funding woes would be eased by a recent agreement with Swedish telecoms group Ericsson under which it would obtain GSM equipment, accessories and system software and pay for the equipment after three years.
Annual payments would depend on the number of subscribers to the new system, reducing Unicom's financing costs and sharing risks with Ericsson, Wang was quoted as saying.
Unicom, set up in 1994, has assets of 130 million yuan, compared to China Telecom's assets of 560 billion yuan.
Unicom won the backing of Premier Zhu Rongji this year to roll out a CDMA network by December. Zhu has sought to boost competition in the sector in the face of complaints about high prices and poor service by the state-owned China Telecom.
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