According to a recent report

Apr 16, 2007 07:46 GMT  ·  By

Not only does China impress when it comes to the number of subscribers its mobile operators have, with China Mobile's number of customers surpassing the whole population of the US, but also with the number of mobile phones manufactured in the country.

According to a recent Research and Markets report, China was the world's largest manufacturing base throughout last year and close to half (46.9 percent) of the handsets that went for sale worldwide were made in China. Out of the phones produced there, an estimated 103 million mobiles were sold on the Chinese market, while 252.2 million were exported.

Areas such as Shenzhen, Tianjin, Beijing or Suzhou have become quite important for handset manufacturing, forming a complete mobile phone industry supply chain. Lately, some of the more important manufacturers have also started showing an interest in India and are looking to move their manufacturing operations there.

But when it comes to infrastructure and human resources, India can't be compared to China which is why most phone companies still prefer the latter. Keeping this in mind, chances of India being a replacement for China as a mobile phone manufacturing base are very slim.

Also, it's widely known that most of the highly successful handset manufacturers come from Asia, and companies from Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and, yes even China are responsible for quite a few innovative products or improvements that push the industry forward. While at first thought 'made in China' could define a cheaply executed, low-quality product, when it comes to mobile phones that wear the brands of top manufacturers, it is really not the case. Aside from China's dominance as a manufacturing base, the report also revealed that around 970 million units were shipped throughout the last year, 90.72 percent of which were produced by the top 9 manufacturers.