China Mobile reportedly achieved its year-end target of 50 million 4G subscribers by the end of October, two months ahead of schedule. According to a recent Reuters report, China’s state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission made such an announcement last week, although the carrier has yet to release its latest operational data confirming the news.

The world’s largest carrier has had a strong run in the country’s 4G market this year. The carrier added about 41 million 4G and 53 million 3G subscribers in the nine months ending September 2014, compared to the combined tally of less than 33 million additions by rivals China Unicom and China Telecom in the same period. China Mobile’s subscriber adds can be attributed to its aggressive network expansion, improved user handset options and higher subsidy offerings. By the end of October, China Mobile had installed 570,000 4G base stations in 300 cities, covering 75% of the country’s population of about 1.4 billion.

The company benefited from the fact that the Chinese government has only recently awarded FDD-LTE 4G licenses to carriers, and the smaller players intend to build and expand their 4G networks using the FDD-LTE standard. The lack of FDD-LTE licenses was preventing China Unicom and China Telecom from rapidly expanding their 4G networks in the country since their existing wireless networks (WCDMA 3G) are more compatible with FDD-LTE, unlike China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA 3G network. China Mobile’s 3G network is compatible with the TD-LTE 4G standard, for which licenses were awarded by the government in December. This helped China Mobile grow its 4G subscriber base exponentially from just over 1.3 million users in February to about 41 million users at the end of September and 50 million at the end of October. Apple‘s latest iPhones are likely to boost China Mobile’s 4G user base further, after their launch in the country on Oct 17.

China Mobile’s total wireless subscriber base at the end of September was 799 million, including about 285 million high speed (3G & 4G) users. The wireless major enjoys a dominant share of 62.5% in the country’s wireless market, reporting an improvement of over 30 basis points since the start of the year. It is followed by China Unicom and China Telecom with 23.3% and 14.2%, respectively. The steady gain in high speed subscribers also helped China Mobile improve its 3G/4G mix by over 10 percentage points in the last nine months to 35.7%.

By: DocMemory
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