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Strategies & Market Trends : China Warehouse- More Than Crockery -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (284)	8/11/2003 1:11:44 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6370

Cut-price 'Little Smart' wireless a big hit in China Reuters News Service BEIJING - Liu Ying says she was sceptical at first when friends raved about a cheap wireless phone service known in China as "Little Smart." "In the early days, the signal was so bad that people had to wave their arms or walk around in circles to get it working," she told Reuters by telephone from the city of Chengde in the northern province of Hebei. "They looked like Falun Gong practitioners," she said with a chuckle, referring to a banned spiritual group that practices slow exercises. Liu, 25, and unemployed after graduating from university, said she eventually signed up for the service, known as personal access system (PAS) or personal handyphone system (PHS) in the industry, to take advantage of bargain rates and one-way charges. And over the years, she said, the signal had improved enough to let users talk without annoying disruptions in moving cars. With at least 20 million subscribers in China, the unusual technology has overcome the initial failure of its launch in its native Japan late in the 1990s, where its level of mobility was over-hyped and the cost advantage was not sufficient to win success. It is also set to take off in India and Indonesia, the other major developing markets in Asia. And it offers a growth alternative -- alongside Nextel Communications Inc.'s walkie-talkie push-to-talk system -- to the dominant Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technologies. The upstart service, offered by fixed-line firms China Telecom and China Netcom, is cheaper to deploy than true mobile services because it is built on an existing fixed-line network and must remain tethered to its home base. Analysts say Little Smart will boast as many as 90 million users in China by 2005, despite the likely launch of third-generation mobile services by then. HOOKING USERS China had 234.5 million mobile users by the end of June, making it the world's largest mobile market by users, and future subscribers will come from smaller cities or the countryside where some two-thirds of the population live, analysts said. That's a market that Little Smart, or "Xiaolingtong" in Chinese, can court regardless of 3G because its chief advantage is price, they said. Per minute rates are 50 to 75 percent lower than other mobile services. chron.com