What role do foreign telecom companies have to play in China?
As far as foreign equipment companies are concerned, they’ve already been there from the early 1980s. For mobile operators, there is already a lot of cooperation now for roaming services – if you don’t have an agreement with foreign operators you can’t offer roaming outside of China, and vice versa. By way of example, Vodafone has an investment in China Mobile and SK Telecom maybe moving from China Unicom perhaps to China Telecom in order to cooperate on CDMA 2000 services. Q: What benefit does foreign cooperation bring to Chinese telecom companies? A: Cooperation with foreign operators presents a good opportunity for Chinese carriers to see how the telecom business is run overseas. Management at all three domestic operators have indicated they would like to go beyond China’s borders to improve relationships with foreign partners, but it’s not easy for them to operate abroad. At present, China Mobile has limited operations in Pakistan and China Telecom has limited operations in Europe
