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BEIJING: Egg crepe seller Zhang Zhengnong said his family was one of the first in its poor neighbourhood in rural China to install a telephone at home.
“It was a big deal,” recalled the 28-year-old from the central province of Anhui, cracking open eggs and scattering spring onions to stuff Chinese “jianbing” at Beijing’s busiest outdoor market.
“All the neighbours came over to use our phone because it was the only one for miles around. We were always passing along messages for other people.”
That was a decade ago. Zhang, who moved to the capital in 2001 to sell the savoury snack, bought a shiny silver mobile phone last year, joining nearly 257 million other cellphone subscribers who have been quietly leading a revolution in telecommunications.
The officially Communist country, which once discouraged private citizens from owning luxury items such as telephones, hit a milestone last weekend when it became one of the few markets to boast more mobile phone subscribers than fixed-line users.
While operators in more developed economies struggle to grow in saturated markets, China’s mobile users are likely to double to 500 million by 2007, surpassing the population of the United States.
“There’s still a lot of room for growth,” said Craig Watts, a director at Beijing-based Norson Telecom Consulting. “China is going to be the world’s most important mobile market in the next 10 years.”
LUCKY NUMBERS: In the vegetable and dry goods market where Zhang works, the mobile trade is flourishing.
About a dozen shabby mobile phone stalls have taken over shops that previously sold clothing or shoes. Superstitious callers can buy a phone number ending in lucky numbers such as 2 and 8.
The rise in subscribers is being driven by China’s sizzling economy, which expanded 8.5 per cent in the first nine months of this year, Merrill Lynch analyst Agnes Ho said in a research report.
“(This) is good news for equipment makers, as it signals the need for further network expansion and demand for handsets,” she wrote.—Reuters
