Friday, March 02, 2007

Who will have the largest share of China 3G market?

3/2/2007, According to local news papers, China Mobile will ask equipment manufactures to provide informal bids for TD-SCDMA network building. Earlier reports revealed that the TD-SCDMA procurement tenders will be worth CNY26.7 billion (USD3.45 billion). China Mobile is reported to be building commercial TD-SCDMA networks in eight cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenyang, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Qinhuangdao and Xiamen. Five of them will be the host city of Olympic 2008. It was predicated that China Mobile will launch the 3G service after October of this year.
But who will have the largest share of this big TD-SCDMA cake? Since it is a Chinses 3G standard, Chinese equipments manufacters will have more advantages in the coming bid. Huawei, ZTE, Datang, Putian, Shanghai Bell all hope to have bigger share. Will they success?
Although as the bellweather of Chinese communication equipments supplier, Huawei are not sure they can have the largest share. First because their focus was always on WCDMA, Secondly their joint-venture company with Simens on TD-SCDMA base station. But after merge of Siemens and Nokia, the future of this joint-venture company became unclear.
Before Chinese new year, it was reported ZTE will have more than 30% share of this big bid. ZTE begun their TD-SCDMA R&D as early as in year 2001. As the second largest equipment supplier in China, they are confident they will have better opporuntiy this time. They also have some cooperation with Erission in this field.
It was Datang who first publish the TD-SCDMA standard. But because of shortage of fund, Observers are always pessimistic on that they can get bigger share. If the coming bid can make this company survive longer, it will be very good for them. Maybe the biggest advantage on this field is their cooperation with Shanghai Bell.
Putian cooperated with Nokia on TD-SCDMA, their fund situation is better than Datang, but their technology is the worst compared with others. It is sure that they will not become the leader, but anyway, they will not get a small share.

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