BEIJING-While China’s mobile-phone subscribers nearly doubled to 85.26 million last year, the country’s paging manufacturers and operators fought a rearguard battle. With continuing price drops in handsets and mobile services, more pager users are switching to mobile phones.
The number of subscribers at China’s major paging operator China Unicom increased by a mere 4 percent last year to 48.64 million. The country has around 1,700 paging operators, of which many are small operations. This makes it difficult to find reliable statistics of the total number of paging subscribers in the country.
Even the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) usually only provides paging subscriber numbers for China Unicom, which has the world’s largest paging network, with a capacity of more than 100 million. The Chinese press has mentioned the figure of 72 million subscribers for all paging operators combined by the end of last year.
Once a status symbol, the venerable pager has been relegated to the poor man’s cell-phone alternative. The country’s dominant paging operator, China Unicom, took the drastic promotional step to donate pagers to college and technical school students in South China’s Hainan Province. Pager prices have plummeted from 1,000 yuan to 200 yuan (US$121 to US$24), often including a one-year service fee. At such low prices, pagers become a useful giveaway if operators make users pay for call services.
Some paging operators are fighting back by offering e-mail and information services, such as stock quotes and weather forecasts, but it is an uphill battle as such services are also becoming more popular on mobile handsets.
Runxun Telecom Development, a pioneering paging operator in Shenzhen, close to Hong Kong, now boasts 2.5 million pager customers, but nevertheless found it necessary to branch out into Internet access and other value-added services. It opened more than 800 telecom retail stores to cushion a drop in paging operating income.
As long as the major mobile-phone operators, China Mobile and China Unicom, retain two-way billing, some customers will keep their pagers to avoid being charged when called. MII has promised not to switch to a caller-pays system before the end of next year. On the other hand, the Shanghai branch of China Mobile has started offering paging integrated with its mobile service.
While city dwellers are increasingly deserting the pager, the vast countryside could still offer a potential market, but with handset prices dropping, even the peasants might decide to leapfrog directly to mobile services.
