China Mobile, the country’s biggest mobile telco, this week installed a long-serving bureaucrat as the new ‘Party Chief’ at the state-owned firm, perhaps signaling that the government wanted to tighten the reins on China Mobile, after years of it being dogged by corruption scandals.
Xi Guohua (pictured, right) is a former vice-minister at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and is now given more power than China Mobile’s chairman, thanks to his party status.
Last month, a former senior executive at China Mobile was sentenced to the death penalty for taking millions in RMB of bribes from Siemens AG.
The new head, Mr. Xi, 60, is a telecoms industry veteran, in both state and private companies, including the post of chairman at Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell in 2000.
From 3G to 4G
China Mobile is moving towards its next hurdle: 4G network adoption. China Mobile struggled throughout the ongoing 3G era due to its having to use the home-grown TD-SCDMA 3G spectrum, in a government-mandated move to avoid dependance on the western CDMA and W-CDMA technologies.
But the plan backfired, and China Mobile soon found itself being swamped by its much smaller mobile telco rivals when it came to 3G user-adoption.
It meant that the telco could not host Apple’s hit iPhone on the network, although ongoing rumors suggest that might change this year, with some deal purportedly having been hammered out between China Mobile and Apple to bring the iPhone to China Mobile.
Only recently have much more convincing handsets became available for China Mobile’s network, such as Motorola’s MT870, which is based on their dual-core Atrix smartphone. As a result, China Mobile is keen to push China forward onto different 4G spectrums.
[Source for news and image: Caijing.com.cn – article in Chinese]
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