3G Mobile Phone Standards Awarded in China

State-run Xinhua news agency announced on Wednesday that China had finally granted licenses for third-generation mobile phones. The licenses were awarded to state owned mobile phone operators.

According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China Mobile Ltd., which can be nominated as the world's largest mobile service provider considering the number of subscribers it has, received a license for the TD-SCDMA Chinese-developed 3G standard also known as "Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access."

According to the announcement, licenses for 3G phones using foreign standards were also awarded. China Unicom Ltd. was granted the license for Europe's WCDMA standard, while China Telecom Corp. is reported to have received a license for the U.S.-developed CDMA 2000.

“3G cell phone sales would top 300 billion yuan ($44 billion) during the 2009-2011 period.” Sinolink Securities analyst Chen Yunhong is quoted by the Xinhua report to have said.

China was rumored in several cases to plan excluding foreign telecoms from the 3G licensing, which we should admit presented much interest to a large number of global investors. China's telecommunication industry has been through a rough period lately, experiencing restructuring and consolidation that led to having only three mobile-phone operators in the country, instead of six, as before.

The latest move in the area is the acquisition of China Network Communications Group Corp by China Unicom, which announced on Tuesday receiving government approval for the deal.

Although the licensing of the 3G standard in China comes as great news, at least for users, the telecom share prices have not been much helped by the measure. According to the news, China Mobile's stock dropped 5.5 percent in Hong Kong trading, China Unicom went down by 10.6 percent, while China Telecom fell 5 percent.