“China Mobile Ltd hopes to tap pent-up demand for Apple Inc smartphones by rolling out new 4G technology this year and having an iPhone model that will finally run on it,” Lee Chyen Yee reports for Reuters.
“The world’s largest mobile carrier – with more than twice as many subscribers as there are people in the United States – already has more than 10 million of its customers owning an iPhone even though the gadget doesn’t properly work with the Chinese firm’s homegrown TD-SCDMA 3G technology, which is not compatible with global technologies,” Yee reports. “That inferior technology, and the failure to offer customers an iPhone contract – which its main rivals do – has been a key reason for China Mobile’s slowing profit growth.”
Yee reports, “Industry experts expect Apple’s next iPhone will support China Mobile’s TD-LTE 4G technology, even though this will be less widely used than the FDD-LTE standard. ‘Apple’s iPhones will be like a killer app for China Mobile once it gets its 4G up and running,’ said Huang Leping, an analyst at Nomura International in Hong Kong. ‘That will definitely boost user numbers, though it will weigh on the bottomline in the first year or so as China Mobile will most probably have to provide heavy handset subsidies for the iPhone.'””
Read more in the full article here.
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So analysts, do you think Apple may be building any server farms in Hong Kong and elsewhere in China to support the surge there in China. At more than a billion a farm, it is good to have a few extra billion in countries where you need these.
Oh, how many server farms is Samsung building? How many have they built so far?
I have no idea if Apple is building server farms in Hong Kong. I just wish they would get the China Mobile deal completed. That small iPhone is coming in about three or four months so it’s time to get it done.