China Mobile inks retail deal to promote home-grown 3G use

China Mobile has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with retail firm D.phone to jointly promote China Mobile’s 3G network, phones and services. China Retail News reports that by utilising D.phones nationwide retail sites, China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA devices will become more readily available. As noted by TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database, whilst China Mobile is the largest cellco by subscribers in the country it is struggling to compete against its domestic rivals in the 3G market: whilst it cellco represented 65.3% of the total wireless market at the end of June 2012, it claimed 38.2% of the 3G market. The disparity is due largely to the operator’s choice of platform. China Mobile uses home-grown technology TD-SCDMA, whilst its rivals China Unicom and China Telecom utilise W-CDMA and CDMA2000 respectively. Consequently, Unicom and Telecom have access to a greater technology ecosystem, with a wider range of devices available to their customers. The operator has announced plans to increase cooperation with manufacturers in an effort to even the odds and will sweeten the deal by increasing handset subsidies.