A handful of foreign and domestic companies will provide the phones to operator China Unicom, including Motorola, Nokia, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Huawei Technology, ZTE Corp. and Hisense. The phones will sell for around $50.

Unicom said it's the company's largest purchase of the ultra-low cost handsets, and should account for one third of its handset purchases this year. The operator plans to buy another 1 million to 2 million of the phones before year end.

China is the world's largest cell phone market, with more than 400 million subscribers. Now that cell phone markets in the top-tier and many of the second-tier cities are saturated, China's telcos are looking to grow in third-tier cities and the poorer countryside, where nearly 800 million Chinese live.

China Unicom has already spent more than $1.3 billion to expand their networks in rural regions. And for China Mobile, the largest mobile provider, more than half of its new subscribers in the first half of 2006 came from small cities, towns and villages, according to Beijing-based BDA China Ltd.

Market research firm iSuppli Corp. estimates that ultra-low cost handset shipments in China exceeded 1 million units in 2006. The research firm predicts the market will expand to 14.7 million phones by 2010, accounting for 10 percent of Chinese domestic sales.

By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved