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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: engineer who wrote (33086)	3/4/2003 11:54:34 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 197265

Is there a table or something that breaks down various regions in terms of handset growth rate, GSM market share (and growth rate), and CDMA market share (and growth rate)? That would be a good map to look at.

To: engineer who wrote (33086)	3/4/2003 10:42:15 PM
From: Eric L	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 197265

engineer, Cellular History << man, you are hard to talk to ... Don't confuse history with statistics. >> I must say that it is always fascinating to hear your interpretation of cellular history, events pertaining to same, the dates you ascribe to events, and your OPINION of why technology decisions were made by carriers and vendors along the way. Given your CREDENTIALS (as you would say) I think all of us are grateful for your participation in this thread, the technical knowledge you impart, and the industry anecdotes that you share Having said that, and with no intent to be disrespectful, I often find - rightly or wrongly - your recall of events and the dates associated with them somewhat faulty, and on occasion the opinions you have formed rather parochial. At the very least they do not always jive with my own observations of events that have transpired here in the USA and elsewhere as we migrated from analog wireless telephony in a mobile environment to digital, and as a consequence I have developed some opinionated opinions which certainly differ from your opinionated opinions <g>. If you don't mind I would like to supplement your interpretation of cellular history as it pertains to China by quoting wireless pioneer Dr. William C.Y Lee who today is Chairman of Linkair, formerly was Chief Scientist of Vodafone AirTouch PLC, and who was instrumental in obtaining initial Pactel funding for CDMA development at Qualcomm after finishing his tour as one of the premier "laboratory geniuses" at AT&T in the analog era of the seventies and eighties. Dr. Lee states and I quote: >> In 1991, Lee introduced the CDMA system in China [and in 1992 helped host in a 3 day seminar called "What is CDMA" at Designing Institute, MPT, Zheng Zhou, Henan, China]. In 1994, China was in the stages of making a decision on selecting international digital systems. Gao-Feng Zhu Vice Minister of MPT, made three guiding principles for the Chinese wireless communication deployment: 1. Continue deploying the TACS analog system. 2. Make limited trial of GSM system. 3. Watch CDMA development closely. Zhu and his staff were interested in CDMA and visited Qualcomm in 1994. When Zhu could get no information on the growth rate of subscribers in Los Angeles in 1995 and could not be sure that CDMA was a mature system, he and his successor in late 1995 could not wait and decided to deploy GSM in China. CDMA then lost China's market. GSM ended up with a great and unexpected market penetration in China. At the end of 1997, 1 million GSM subscribers were added every month in China. During this time period, CDMA's system could not speed up in development and achieve an expected system improvement, as compared with Qualcomm's first achievement in 1989 [the 6 month Qualcomm development effort resulting in the November 3, 1989 demonstration of CDMA hosted by Pactel & Qualcomm at Qualcomm headquarters]. At the same time, GSM's global penetration drastically increased. This was definitely the dark ages (1994-1996) for CDMA. << As a matter of historical fact China Mobile went commercial with a GSM network in November 1994, the same month that Motorola attempted unsuccessfully to bring Hutchinson live with CDMA in Hong Kong on the first go round. China Unicom went live with their GSM network in July 1995 several months before the 2nd and somewhat more successful, but not overwhelmingly successful attempt to bring Hong Kong up. Dr. Lee explains that initial 1994 failure in Hong Kong and the subsequent failure to bring up Los Angeles in January 1995 which China was watching very closely this way: >> Motorola developed the system for commercial use based on the first issue of IS-95 which was not a mature specification for commercial use in [1994 or] 1995. Furthermore, Motorola's control BSC (CBSC) became a bottleneck in the network under heavy traffic making it difficult for the operator to increase the number of subscribers while retaining the voice quality of each traffic channel. As a result the operators could only migrate the heavy users from the analog system to increase usage but could not increase the capacity .... << What I quoted above is Dr. Lee's interpretation of events and I can't verify it to be 100% accurate so I invite your comments. His account of events and rationale does however jive with cellular history as it has been related to me by individuals that had active exposure to the opening of China to digital wireless mobile telephony and personal exposure I had to Chinese mobile wireless decision making in late 1995 and early 1996. << China had nothing. they wanted to get a system in place., they bought GSM on the premise that the handsets were cheaper. In 1995-1997 they were cheaper. So they went with the system. >> In all due respect, I think that they "bought GSM" because it was a mature end to end fully standardized digital technology. Certainly that is the point that Dr. Lee attempted to make. I do not think that initially the cost of handsets was an issue. CDMA handsets that worked were simply not available from anyone at any price at the time China decided to implement GSM. << Don't confuse history with statistics. ... The reason is that the Chinese can build their own handsets, fix the trade balance, learn and build knowledge for exporting handsets to the world. ... Within the next 3 years, I expect the China model to look like the Korean model, which is that they export as many handsets as they consume internally.>> I think some statistics may be in order, here. The Chinese are already well embarked on that initiative but it is not now, and will not be in the future, simply with CDMA handsets as the initiative had already started with GSM handsets with and without joint ventures well before the first CDMA handset was ever produced in China. Below are statistics recently compiled by China’s Ministry of Information Industry (MII) and reported last month in DigiTimes. According to MII, 132 million mobile phones were produced last year in China either for internal use or export. Obviously the vast majority were GSM, not CDMA, and Chinese manufacturers produced 40% of the domestic supply. Ningbo Bird, replaced TCL Mobile Communication as the number 3 handset vendor in China, trailing after Motorola and Nokia and Chinese Electronics Corporation (CEC) is moving up the ladder rapidly. MII's statistics are as follows: MII: China 2002 handset production and sales (million units) Rank Company China production China sales 1 Motorola 37.499 18.724 2 Nokia 32.287 11.347 3 Ningbo Bird 7.492 6.786 4 TCL ? 6.706 Best, - Eric -