Operators Announce April 2008 Subscriber Totals
Marbridge Consulting, 5/20/08
China's four main telecom operators have announced their subscriber totals for April 2008.
Mobile subscriber uptake was down from its February peak of almost 9.5 mln, but still robust with a total of 8.9 mln new subscribers in the month. Of this total, China Mobile (NYSE: CHL; 0941.HK) added 7.4 mln subs, to reach 399.5 mln, while China Unicom (NYSE: CHU; 0762.HK; 600050.SH) added 1.5 mln new subs (1.2 mln GSM subs and 289,000 CDMA subs) to reach 168.5 mln (125.4 mln GSM subs and 43.1 mln CDMA subs). Of total new subs added in April, China Mobile took 83%, bringing its share of China's total mobile user base to 70.3%. Also worth noting is that, with a much-awaited, but not yet officially announced industry restructuring expected to see Unicom's CDMA network transferred to fixed-line operator China Telecom (NYSE: CHA; 0728.HK), Unicom appears to have significantly reduced efforts to promote its CDMA services; in the first four months of 2008, Unicom added 4.87 mln new GSM subs, a period-on-period growth rate increase of 10%, but added only 1.17 mln new CDMA subs, a period-on-period growth rate decrease of almost 32%.
Fixed-line operators suffered further contraction of their user-bases in April. China Telecom lost 880,000 fixed-line subs, bringing its total to 216.3 mln, and China Netcom (NYSE: CN; 0906.HK) lost 360,000 fixed-line subs, dropping its total to 108.7 mln.
Broadband helped prop up the fixed-line operators, but saw the lowest combined new user growth (1.1 mln new users between China Telecom and China Netcom) so far this year. China Telecom added 650,000 new broadband users to reach 38.4 mln and Netcom added 460,000 to reach 22.1 mln.
Keywords: fixed-line subscribers broadband subscribers mobile subscribers statistics 0728.HK 0762.HK 0906.HK 0941.HK 600050.SH broadband CDMA CHA China Mobile China Netcom China Telecom China Unicom CHL CHU CN GSM telecom wireless
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