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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, March 05, 2002

China Has Become No.1 Mobile Phone Country in the World

In a short span of a dozen years or so, China has become a No.1 country in the world for cellular phone users. It's nothing strange and new to see a garbage collector with a mobile phone in hand. However, to go unmatchable to its place is that China has no brand-name cellular phone of its own. It was not until 1998 that Kejian fired the first shot in the homemade cellular phone field and then followed by Xoceco, TCL, Bird and Hai'er in the wake, forming gradually a contingent to break out of the encirclement.


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In a short span of a dozen years or so, China has become a No.1 country in the world for cellular phone users. It's nothing strange and new to see a garbage collector with a mobile phone in hand. However, to go unmatchable to its place is that China has no brand-name cellular phone of its own. It was not until 1998 that Kejian fired the first shot in the homemade cellular phone field and then followed by Xoceco, TCL, Bird and Hai'er in the wake, forming gradually a contingent to break out of the encirclement.

At the very beginning the contingent vowed to seize back half of the lost market within a timeframe of three years. Now three years have gone by but we failed to see half of the lost territory return into our own hands. However, appreciable is the achievement in which we saw merely less than 3 percent of market shares in our hands in 1999, then a rise to 8 percent in 2000 followed with an increase to 15 percent in 2001. Though the statistic seems to be somewhat doubtable yet the homemade cellular phone has become a forcible detachment not to be belittled.

Where lies the superiority of the homemade mobile phone?

The opponents of the homemade mobile phone are the Motorola, Nokia and Ericsson, the 500 powers among the world enterprises. Moreover, the homemade one still lags far behind those of foreign brands in terms of technology in general while the technology at the core is almost totally controlled in the hands of foreigners. As compared to the foreign-made ones the homemade can be renewed once in three months while the international market witnesses a change once in seven days. You could find the homemade cellular phone a "maiden in boudoir" not a long time ago while the foreign brands had already seen a long accumulation in the past, let alone the price-slashes.

The homemade cellular phone giants have come to realize that the competition in the mobile phone market lies in its core technology. The Zhongxing, as learned, puts 10 percent of its sales revenue into its research and development work. The annual R & D investment by TCL is going to exceed 3 hundred million yuan while Hai'er is setting up research branches in Europe, America and Hong Kong in order to make a breakthrough in the key technology. All efforts made are aiming at breaking up the technological monopoly of foreign manufacturers. Today, the production of homemade cellular phone has passed through the stage of "labeling brand-names" to the phase of R & D on key technology. The "auto-reporting technology for the lost" made by Xoceco for cellular phone and the CDMA technology on the separation of chip-card and phone-set by Kejian have already made a great show for the homemade cellular phone in the world. In the meanwhile, the state will also make a lump sum of funds to support the research & development work of the homemade cellular phone.

Whoever knows the best of Chinese consumers, said the expert, will eventually win over the Chinese market and in this respect the finest follow-up service is the advantage enjoyed by the local manufacturers. Many retailers of foreign-made mobile phones are simmering with anger that they have never seen the foreign manufacturers at all though they've been engaged in the selling for years on end yet they are unable to solve many problems brought up by consumers. Some retailers though have replaced the bad phone-sets for consumers in line with the principle of three-guarantees they were turned down by foreign manufacturers. However, this would not and will not happen to the domestic producers, and retailers can set their hearts at ease about it.

Aside from the aforesaid, the high cost as entailed from the high investment in the earlier days will by and by be digested. And along with the daily expansion in production scale and the ceaseless decrease in purchasing cost the advantage of the homemade cellular phone in price is coming to show with every passing day.



By PD Online Staff Han Rongliang

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