China Unicom to accelerate GPS service

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, February 10, 2004

China Unicom to accelerate GPS service

To sharpen its competitive edge, China Unicom Corp announced on February 9 it will work intensively with Qualcomm Inc to accelerate its location-based services under the brand "U-Map."

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To sharpen its competitive edge, China Unicom Corp announced on February 9 it will work intensively with Qualcomm Inc to accelerate its location-based services under the brand "U-Map."

"Though it contributes to only a small part of our business now, we see huge market potential for the services," said Li Weichong, general director of the Marketing and Sales Department at China Unicom Corp.

According to him, the services only account for about 3 to 4 per cent of its total business so far.

Nevertheless, it is likely to become a new revenue maker for the company, he said on February 9 while announcing promotion activities focusing on location-based services, to be held in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou from February 12 to 14.

Based on Qualcomm Inc's gpsOne (global positioning system) technology, "U-Map" provides navigating functions to customers.

It is one of China Unicom's six major wireless value-added services under the name of "U-Max," which was officially launched in July last year. The services are currently available in three cities - Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

"We still need some time to roll out the service nationwide as it takes time to build up enough base stations and have enough content providers for the services," Li said.

"It may take some time to realize the goal but the trend is foreseeable," he said.

With increasing competition from its major rival China Mobile and other telecom operators, China Unicom hopes to develop more value-added telecommunications services based on its CDMA1X (code division multiple access) network so as to consolidate its market share.

Dai Chunrong, an analyst with China Securities, believes that the value-added services will have a positive impact on the growth of wireless data usage and contribute to beefing up China Unicom's average revenue per user.

China Unicom had recruited 70 million GSM subscribers and 19.06 million CDMA subscribers by the end of last year.

Source:China Daily

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