China's Telecom industry in 2008

The following is a profile of China's telecom industry in 2008.

-- Overview: China's telecom industry reported 2.24395 trillion yuan in business volume during 2008, up 21 percent year on year. It also marked 813.99 billion yuan in revenue, a seven percent increase.

It accomplished a telecom fixed asset investment of 295.37 billion yuan, and realized added value of 472.62 billion yuan, up 29.6 percent and 0.3 percent, respectively.

The industry's general price level declined 11.5 percent, as free incoming calls were achieved, it charged less for long-distance calls and it lowered roaming fees.

The following Chart 1 shows the telecom price change from 2004 to 2008.

-- Subscribers The number of China's phone users increased 69.092 million to 982.034 million. Of the total phone users, handset subscribers accounted for 65.3 percent.

The following Chart 2 shows the phone user number growth from 2004 to 2008.

Chart 3 is the proportion of mobile users in China's total phone users between 2004 to 2008.

In 2008, mobile phone users rapidly increased, when February growth hit a monthly record high of 9.458 million. The prevalence rate of mobile phones reached 48.5 sets per hundred people in 2008, up from 2007's 6.9.

Below, Chart 4 shows the number of newly added mobile phone users in 2008.

Among mobile phone users, the number of mobile group data users increased by 94.78 million to reach 253.925 million, and the penetration rate of this business rose to 39.6 percent in 2008, over 29.1 percent in 2007.

The number of fixed phone subscribers declined by 24.842 million to arrive at 340.804 million. Included in that number were 231.995 million in urban areas and 108.81 million in rural areas, down 16.602 million and 8.23 million, respectively.>>>

Unsolicited Commercial Communication - TRAI’s NDNC for SMS

The recent TRAI guidelines about UCC (Unsolicited Commercial Communication) is causing more grief than doing anything useful to strengthen the regulatory framework to curb UCC.
While the motive is good, implementation sucks.

What’s the whole purpose of NDNC?

A reasonable answer would be to “cut down on spam, sms promotional marketing and such related messages”. But apparently, the regulatory body doesn’t think logically and prefers to use an axe to create ad-hoc rules. For a 2nd, 3rd tier SMS provider (e.g. ValueFirst) in India, it creates lot of problems. Their customers are forced to such ridiculous guidelines even when their customers are using the SMS delivery service for a productive application (say, banking or peer-2-peer message) wherein the end-customer (like you and me) wouldn’t mind getting such SMS.

UK Mobile Market Map

FirstPartner, a UK based market research firm, has released the latest version of their UK Mobile Market Map.

The map provides a 360 degree view of the mobile marketing industry, covering the essential UK facts, figures, players and trends. Download a copy here.

The map shows the key mobile enablers, agencies, and mobile advertising platforms. It also show aggregators, ad networks, metrics companies, and MVNO’s. In other words, all the key players in the UK mobile market.

The map also provides some key market figures and projections from FirstPartner.>>>