China Mobile has become the world’s first mobile operator to pass the half-billion subscriber mark.
The Chinese carrier yesterday said it had added 5.26 million new customers in August to take its total to 502.94 million.
While Mobile, the world’s largest operator by customer numbers, no longer dominates in the way it has in recent years, when it snared up to 90% of all growth, is still taking the lion’s share of new subs. Last month it captured 65% of all new mobile subscribers.
However, the market is still indifferent to its new TD-SCDMA service, which attracted just 239,000 new customers. It now has 1.33 million customers on the network.
China Mobile’s most aggressive competitor is newcomer China Telecom, which added 2.08 million new cdma2000 subs to take its total to 43.81 million.
GSM provider China Unicom clocked up just 807,000 new customers to take its tally to 141.86 million.