China Mobile has overtaken Vodafone as the largest mobile phone company in the world. It claims to be larger based on market capitalization (China Mobile has $131.6 billion while Vodafone has $109.3 billion) as well as by users, with Chinese company claiming more than 200 million customers while “the most recent figure from Vodafone shows 186.8 million worldwide”.
That being said, mobile phone companies used to report inflated figures by reporting all their pre-paid customers as current customers, even if the customer hadn’t used the service in years. I don’t know how China Mobile reports its customers, but at that level of subscribers it could make a large difference. Vodafone is still in more countries than China Mobile, of course, and still has a higher turnover.
Also, China Telecom has announced plans to buy China Unicom’s CDMA network as part of its preparations for the much-anticipated release of 3G licenses in China.
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