Thursday, December 23, 2010

833+ Million Cell Phones?

This article suggests that there are over 833 million cell phone subscribers in China.
November saw the net addition of 8.86 mln new mobile subscribers. China Mobile (NYSE: CHL; 0941.HK) added 4.62 mln new mobile subscribers, pushing the operator's total mobile user base to 579.64 mln, of which a total of 18.84 mln subscribers used China Mobile's TD-SCDMA terminals during the month.

China Unicom (NYSE: CHU; 0762.HK; 600050.SH) added 0.6 mln new GSM subscribers, bringing its total GSM user base to 152.75 mln, and added 1.12 mln subscribers to its WCDMA 3G network, for a total of 12.78 mln WCDMA users.

China Telecom (NYSE: CHA; 0728.HK) added 2.51 mln CDMA subs, taking its total to 88.02 mln.

China Mobile = 579.64M
China Unicom = 152.75M + 12.78M
China Telecom = 88.02M

Does that number seem high? That would mean everyone in cities (622 million urban residents) and ~20% of the rest (732 million rural residents) has a cell phone number. I hope they're not just counting the available SIM cards out there. Also, I wonder how they come up with the ~400 million Internet users in China. From news reports, it looks like a survey. How accurate is that compared to every other inflated statistic coming out of China?
The survey, based on a count of residents who said they used the Internet in the past six months, found 29 percent of China's 1.3 billion people are now net users.

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