China approves pilot to open mobile telecoms market, boost competition

December 27, 2013 Leave a comment

China approves pilot to open mobile telecoms market, boost competition

5:27am EST

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China has approved a pilot scheme allowing private companies to piggy back on the country’s three dominant telecommunications providers to offer own-brand mobile services, opening the world’s largest mobile phone market to increased competition.Authorities have approved 11 private “virtual carriers” to resell mobile telecommunications services, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in a statement on its website on Thursday.

The pilot opens up the market for privately run companies to offer discounts or more attractive deals, raising competition in a market dominated by state-owned enterprises China Mobile Ltd, China Telecom Corp Ltd and China Unicom Hong Kong Ltd.

“It’s a milestone. It will draw private investment, and stimulate competition and innovation in the telecoms sector… giving a wide range of consumers greater choice and better service,” the ministry said in the statement.

Under the pilot, private companies will be able to buy mobile communication services in bulk from providers which have their own mobile networks, repackage them and sell them to end users, the official Xinhua news agency said.

China Mobile, which recently reached an agreement to sell Apple Inc’s iPhone, dominates the domestic market with over 760 million subscribers. China Unicom and China Telecom trail with 280 million and 185 million users respectively.

The 11 companies include Net.cn, a subsidiary of online retail giant Alibaba, rival e-commerce firm Jingdong and major Chinese mobile phone retailer D.Phone. Shenzhen-listed Telling Telecommunication Holding Co and Beijing Bewinner Communications Co also got the green light.

The approval documents lay out rules for market supervision, service charges and quality, consumer rights and information protection, the ministry said.

It did not detail how the pilot would affect the network providers.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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