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

To: slacker711 who wrote (44948)	3/9/2005 2:47:26 AM
From: limtex	Respond to of 196474

slacks - There is excess CDMA inventory in North America.....HSPDA <g> well that'll give the slaggers something to get their teeth into. Guess they had to have something with all the better news lately<g> Best, L

To: slacker711 who wrote (44948)	3/9/2005 8:28:42 AM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 196474

China set for new mobile phone price war -- sources reuters.com Tue Mar 8, 2005 11:06 PM ET By Doug Young SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China's top two mobile phone operators are set to launch promotions targeting low-spending users, ending a half-year pause in a price war that has sapped profit margins, two senior telecoms executives said. China Mobile (Hong Kong) Ltd. and China Unicom Ltd. are readying campaigns to grab business from a cheap, limited wireless service offered by fixed-line carriers China Telecom Corp. and China Netcom Group Corp., one of the executives told Reuters on condition of anonymity. The promotions will feature combinations of cheap call plans and subsidised phones and will be launched at the end of this month, the executives said. Spokeswomen from China Mobile and Unicom did not return calls for comment. As well as taking business from the fixed-line companies, Unicom hopes to wrest back market share lost in the past half year to China Mobile, the world's largest mobile carrier by subscribers. The promotions will end about half a year of relative calm in a fiercely competitive industry once convulsed by rampant price wars that whittled away at profit margins. "Both campaigns will last about six months," one of the executives said. The carriers "see this opportunity as a means to pick up some PHS subscribers," he said, referring to the fixed-line carriers' wireless service, known locally as "xiaolingtong". Xiaolingtong calls cost about half as much as regular mobile phone calls, which are priced about 0.6 yuan (7 cents) per minute in Shanghai. SMALLER CITIES China is the world's largest mobile market, with 340 million subscribers at the end of January, about a quarter of the country's 1.3 billion people. But with most affluent urbanites already signed up, carriers have had to turn to lower spending customers in smaller cities to drive growth. So Unicom recently ordered 3 million cheap handsets from Kyocera Corp. of Japan and Chinese manufacturers Hisense Electric Co. and ZTE Corp. M.b< Unicom has used its bulk-ordering power in the past to acquire phones for lower prices than its distributors could get on their own, then passed the savings on to its distributors. "If they get more handsets going to the low end, hopefully they will be able to improve their market share," said Edison Lee, a CSFB analyst. Unicom is scrambling to shore up its position in the market after half a year of middling subscriber growth as it focused on profitability rather than adding new users. Unicom, which controls about a third of China's mobile market, saw its share of new subscribers drop to 31 percent from 38 percent in the past six months, Lee said. The rest went to China Mobile, whose share grew to 69 percent from 62 percent after it mounted a campaign targeted at low-end users in the middle of 2004. But average customer spending has fallen, whittling down net profit margins at China Mobile to 21 percent in the first nine months of 2004 from 22.4 percent a year earlier. Now both companies are hoping to take advantage of the recently slowing growth of xiaolingtong, which means "little smart", a limited-roaming wireless service from China Telecom and China Netcom that took off in 2003. After more than doubling to 32 million users in 2003, the service hit 50 million users by the middle of last year. But growth has slowed since, with the number of subscribers not expected to double again until the end of 2006. Industry watchers have blamed the slowdown on Beijing's attempts to rein in overheated competition in the sector, which attracted about $4 billion of investment between 2001 and 2004.