Mainland mobile subscriber growth 21pc in first half
The number of mobile phone subscribers on the mainland grew 21.6 per cent to 176.16 million in the first half of the year, according to statistics from the Ministry of Information Industry.
Last month, 4.78 million more mainlanders became mobile users, boosting market penetration to about 13.86 per cent. The pace of growth seemed to slow last month, compared with average monthly subscriber growth in the first half of 5.22 million.
Impressive as the mobile subscriber figures are, they were dwarfed by the growth in Internet use, with the number of online users coming in at more than 39.75 million, against 17.36 million at the start of the year.
Analysts said growth in the mobile phone market was in line with expectations.
'I think it is not realistic to assume continued high growth for subscribers, given that it came from a relatively high base,' said CLSA analyst Stephen Leung.
He said subscriber growth had been stimulated by a price war between the two dominant operators, China Mobile and China Unicom, last year, but prices had remained stable this year.
One of the key growth areas was short message services (SMS).
A China Mobile spokesman said on Tuesday 28.2 billion SMS messages had been sent on its network in the first half, surpassing the 15.8 billion sent last year.
Assuming the same growth rate, China Mobile would have achieved its initial SMS volume target of 30 billion this month, following a net addition of 2.69 billion SMS messages last month.
The volume of SMS traffic rose to 8.53 billion last month.
'This is an encouraging figure for China Mobile. It points to the hope of a smooth migration from existing voice services to 2.5-generation data services,' an analyst with a local brokerage said.
He said the SMS service, which cost 10 fen per message, could help stabilise average revenue per user for the mainland's leading mobile operator.
SMS revenue could be worth more than 5.6 billion yuan (about HK$5.24 billion), assuming that the number of SMS messages grows to 56 billion by the end of this year.
Meanwhile, revenue for all telecoms services, including mobile, fixed-line and other value-added services, for the first six months was 184.53 billion yuan, according to government statistics. This represents growth of 16.05 per cent from the corresponding period last year.
Fixed-line users stood at 198.94 million, up 11.12 per cent from the beginning of the year.
