CHINA Mobile Communications Corp, parent of the world's largest wireless-phone operator by users, will seek bids in October for as much as six billion yuan (US$784 million) worth of handsets based on a locally developed high-speed standard, an industry group said yesterday.
About 20 mobile-phone makers including Motorola Inc, Samsung Electronics Co, ZTE Corp and Huawei Technologies Co are expected to bid to supply two million to three million handsets, Chen Haofei, secretary general of industry group TD-SCDMA Forum, told Bloomberg News by telephone from Guangxi, China.
The handsets will be based on China's time division synchronous code division multiple access 3G standard, Chen said.
Handset makers and equipment suppliers such as Ericsson AB are waiting for 3G licenses, which may spur about US$20 billion in spending by China's phone companies, according to estimates by CLSA analyst Francis Cheung. China has said it plans to offer 3G services for the Beijing Olympics starting in August 2008. A specific date was not provided.
"It seems China may not issue 3G licenses until the first half of next year," based on the timing of the bids, said Kelvin Ho, an analyst at Nomura International Ltd in Hong Kong. "The market consensus is China Mobile may get a TD-SCDMA license."
ZTE will bid for the handset orders, said Cheng Yuejuan, a company spokeswoman based in Shenzhen, southern China.
LG Electronics Inc and Datang Telecom Technology Co will also be asked to bid, Chen said. Phone makers will likely supply two million to three million dual-mode handsets costing about 2,000 yuan each, he said.
The phones, which can be used for services based on TD-SCDMA as well as a so-called second-generation standard called global system mobile communications, or GSM, are likely to be delivered by the end of this year or early next year, Chen said.
China Mobile at present offers services based on the GSM standard.
The government in May said it selected two international standards - wideband CDMA, or WCDMA, and CDMA2000 - for 3G services in China, home to 487.4 million mobile users at the end of April.