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To: bananawind who wrote (31452)	6/1/1999 10:02:00 PM
From: straight life	Respond to of 152472

Unicom Grabs CDMA Monopoly with Great Wall Deal By a staff reporter 01 June 1999 The Chinese government has given China Unicom a significant boost by allowing it to become the sole CDMA provider in China. According to the China Daily Digest Business Weekly, the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has given Unicom, the second telecoms operator, permission to take over the four Great Wall mobile networks. The four trial networks in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Guangzhou, are at present jointly owned by China Telecom, the dominant state operator, and the People's Liberation Army. The networks have a combined subscriber capacity of 60,000. China Unicom has earmarked 7 billion yuan ($843 million) to build a CDMA network with a capacity of two million lines this year, and to expand capacity to 10 million lines in 160 cities by the end of next year, said the newspaper. Lucent, Motorola, Samsung and Motorola are currently system suppliers to Great Wall. All four companies, as well as Ericsson which bought Qualcomm's cellular-network equipment manufacturing unit in March, are expected to bid for contracts from Unicom said the report. Unicom is set to select two or three foreign system suppliers for the build out of the CDMA network. The bidding process is set to be a complicated one. Tan Xinghui, general manager of the planning and marketing department at Unicom told the newspaper: "How to deal with trial systems provided by the losers in our bidding will depend on consultation among MII, the Great Wall Network and ourselves." Unicom hopes its CDMA network can eventually compete with China Telecom's dominant GSM service. Its existing GSM mobile phone network has only about 1.5 million subscribers, 5% of the market. It is "taking advantage of government support and the planned breakup of rival China telecom to step up its business this year," said the newspaper. Meanwhile, Unicom is in the early stages of planning a stock issue, an executive in the state-owned company's planning department said. However, the executive, who asked not to be identified, refused to confirm or deny a report in the Asian Wall Street Journal that the company may sell more than $1 billion of shares to overseas investors for listing in Hong Kong and New York. The executive said none of the details of the issue had been decided.