BEIJING—The boom times in China’s mobile telecom sector seem to be over. While the country still added 5.9 million new mobile-phone subscribers in February, more than any other market, both China Mobile and China Unicom will cut planned infrastructure spending this year and next year.
China Mobile slashed its planned infrastructure spending for 2002 from US$5.4 billion to US$4.5 billion. For 2003, the planned spending was cut back from US$5.4 billion to US$4.1 billion.
China Unicom announced planned capital spending of US$2.62 billion in 2002, down 30 percent from 2001.
A renewed upsurge in spending will have to wait for the issuance by the government of new licenses or for upgrading the existing networks to third-generation (3G) technology, but neither is expected to happen anytime soon.
Big mobile vendors like Motorola, Nokia and Ericsson will no longer be able to rely as much as before on the expanding Chinese market to offset sluggish markets elsewhere.
