BEIJING-China Mobile plans to buy 300,000 General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) handsets to promote its multimedia messaging service (MMS), which the company will launch in the coming days, following a similar move by rival China Unicom, which has already bought hundreds of thousands of CDMA handsets.
The promotion is expected to influence the company’s full-year results. China Mobile said it has around 3 million GPRS subscribers. Users who sign up for a significant amount of data traffic will be able to buy the handsets at subsidized prices.
The aggressive promotion of China Unicom’s CDMA network is slowing China Mobile’s subscriber growth. While China Unicom has both GSM and CDMA networks, China Mobile only runs a GSM network, although it still has a significantly larger number of subscribers.
China’s Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has announced that the number of Chinese mobile subscribers hit 184.8 million at the end of August.
