I just wanted to briefly comment on this number. China Mobile has just released its latest quarterly data. The world's largest national mobile operator (as opposed to a mobile operator group serving many countries) has 332 million subscribers end of June. Out of the total worldwide mobile phone subscriber base of 3 billion phones, yes China Mobile alone has 11%.

For contrast, there are just over 300 million citizens of the USA, of which there is a mobile phone subscription for 240 million of them, on any network and about 60 million for the largest mobile operators. Yet China Mobile has 332 million. And they grew 21% in the last year. This is going to be one monster of a giant company by the time Chinese mobile phone growth slows down.

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Tomi T Ahonen is a bestselling author and independent consultant in the emerging areas of next generation wireless who lectures at Oxford University and is seen annually at about 20 telecoms/IT conferences on six continents. His expertise includes the business, applications, services, partnering and marketing of wireless technologies. Tomi provides advanced wireless service marketing plan workshops and business case audits for operators/carriers; new service creation workshops; and value chain analysis for content providers and assists global media, IT and telecoms companies on their transitions to a digitally converged world.

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