LONDON-Mobile subscriber growth of 150 percent in China will provide more than $10 billion in annual service revenues by 2000, forecasts CIT Research in its recent study.
According to the study, “Mobile Communications in Asia & the Pacific 1996,” China is the second largest mobile market in the Asia-Pacific region, after Japan. Cellular subscriber figures in the country more than doubled last year, from 1.57 million to 3.9 million at the end of 1995. Unlike other major mobile markets in the region, China is expected to continue growing beyond 2005, reaching cellular service revenues of more than $13 billion in that year, said CIT.
“It is the major cities and economic zones, led by Hong Kong’s neighboring Guangdong Province, that are driving demand for mobile communications in China,” said Rob Ollerenshaw, CIT’s director of marketing analysis. “Guangdong alone has half the population of Japan, and Shanghai is not much smaller than Tokyo. If you take the country as a whole, it represents 45 percent of the entire Asia-Pacific population. In 10 years’ time, we expect China to account for almost a third of the region’s total cellular service revenues.”
By the turn of the century, CIT said China will be Asia’s largest market for cellular handsets, with annual revenues of around $2.5 billion. By then, the Japanese handset market is expected to be worth $2.1 billion, with increased pressure on prices as competition drives the market.
