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Business English: China Mobile wants to be a big face in the global market

China Mobile may already be the world's biggest wireless company, but it has not been shy about its plan to look for opportunities abroad. von Justine Lau (Hong Kong)

Had China Mobile acquired all the companies it has been linked to in the past two years, it would have expanded into Pakistan, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Ghana, Paraguay and many more countries. But, in spite of a small presence in Hong Kong, China Mobile's footprint remains confined to its home. Most of the reported talks either fell apart or turned out to be pure speculation. What is definite, however, is the Chinese company's ambition to extend its reach well beyond the mainland. China Mobile may already be the world's biggest wireless company in terms of both subscribers and market capitalisation, but the cash-flush company has not been shy about its plan to look for opportunities abroad to boost its earnings and scale. To name a few, the Chinese company in the last two years has been linked to CSL, a Hong Kong-based mobile operator, China Resources Mobile, another Hong Kong firm, Pakistan Telecom, Reliance Telecom of India, Millicom, the emerging market mobile company. Huawei Technologies is among the least widely understood of China's new crop of global companies - a situation unlikely to be changed by the Shenzhen-based company's new advertising campaign. It has also been active in the developed world, most recently looking at the third-generation mobile assets of Hutchison Whampoa in Italy and the UK. Although China Mobile has so far only struck a deal with China Resources Peoples, a Hong Kong-based wireless operator, and confirmed its interests in Pakistan Telecom and Millicom, it has said publicly - many times - that overseas expansion is a long-term goal. The company, which had cash of Rmb71.4bn ($9.5bn) as of June 2006, is especially interested in the emerging markets. Wang Jianzhou, chairman, has said that, whenever he visited developing countries, he was flooded with questions by local operators ranging from how to build a network with no road and no electricity to what to do with a lack of cheap handsets. In a rare interview in August, Mr Wang said that the wisdom of off-shore acquisitions had been underlined by the company's takeover of Peoples. "One of our advantages is scale. We do central procurement so our cost is low. Since we bought Peoples, it only has to pay half what it used to pay for the same equipment," he said. But Mr Wang has also said that China Mobile was not in a hurry. There are still plenty of growth opportunities at home. In November, China Mobile added a record number of subscribers, bringing its total number of users to 294m - almost as large as the population in the US. More importantly, while the mobile penetration rate in China's east coast cities has reached 48 per cent, only one in five people in the poorer central and western regions has mobile phones. "No matter what China Mobile plans to do in other markets, China is likely to remain its growth engine for some time. It has a dominant position and the market is still relatively young. I don't worry about its growth potential here," says Zhang Dongming, research director at telecoms consultancy BDA in Beijing. However, one concern is China's stance over 3G. Beijing has not yet indicated how or when it will issue licences for 3G services. One of the most popular speculations is that China Mobile will be forced to build its 3G network on TD-SCDMA, China's home-grown standard that is commercially unproven. "There are always regulatory risks in China," says Ms Zhang.

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