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Is China Mobile CHL still a buy?

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The re-org of China telecom/wireless industry started officially, with the China Mobile Group acqusision of China Railway Telecom (Teitong), a small fixed line operator. The news drove down the stock price of China Mobile (0941.HK, NYSE:CHL) sharply lower today. Many pundits, speculators and short term investors are worrying the golden (monopoly) days of China Mobile will be over soon.

Not quite. I think about this question hard: will China Mobile lose its competetive edge in the Chinese wireless arena, with the widely expected next steps of re-org? In the re-org China Unicom will sell CDMA networks to China Telecom, and combines with China Netcom, the smaller fixed line operator with a footprint in North China; China Telecom will enter into wireless business with the Unicom CDMA acqusition.

China Mobile pic
(China Mobile restoring wireless service in Sichuan earthquake region, more pics here)

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Why China Mobile CHL is a buy: IV

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Two important news about China wireless arena yesterday.

1) China Mobile finally started the long awaited trial of TD-SCDMA 3G network (read Chinese news story 1 , and 2 from XinhuaNet). Some features of 3G include the video conference/phone, TV program, etc.

2) The new (lower) roaming fees takes effect.

I think 2) may have slightly negative effect on CHL’s earning, while 1) is insignificant and we will not know the success of 3G/TD until 2009/10.

China Mobile 3G TD-SCDMA trial
(Picture from XinhuaNet: people are lining up for 3G phones)

Valuation

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Why China Mobile CHL is a buy: III

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There were some big news in the US wireless arena last week. Verizon and AT&T won the auction of some new wireless spectrum, Google did not win the spectrum (see the details at NYTimes). Do you know how much Verizon paid for the new spectrum? $9.6 billion. Imagine a similar scenario in China, how much does the 3G license cost in China? As far as China Mobile (and China Unicom and Telecom) is concerned, it’s null, zero, no cost.

What? You must think this is crazy. How come the goverment gives away the license for free? Well, the No. 1 reason is the goverment is the biggest shareholder of all those big wireless/telecom companies. If they charge a big fee, essentially they are putting money from left pocket to right pocket. So why bother.

Moat analysis
What does CHL got?

Wang Jian Zhou pic
(CEO Wang Jian Zhou at annual report, from iphonebuzz.com)

1) A top 10 Chinese global brand, which consists of 3 sub brands: GoTone/quan qiu tong (white collars), shen zhou xing (everyone) and dong gan di dai (mobile internet), quote in Chinese:

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Why China Mobile CHL is a buy: II

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As you may aware, terrible things happened in Lasha (China) a few days ago. It is reported 5 young girls who worked for an apparel shop were killed in the riot (in this particular case, arson set by the thugs). I noticed the last text message one of the girl sent to her father is: Don’t worry about me, dad. 最后一条短信：”不要担心我”. I certainly wish things would turn out differently for the girls. But on the bright side, I think her family at least got some pieces of their girl’s last moment. This reminds me of a related event. On September 11, 2001, some people who buried under world trader center tried to call their family members, or text messaging, and some got saved that way. I’m sure you have heard similar stories about cell phone saving people’s lives too.

So what’s my point? We are increasingly living in a mobile world nowadays. From business point of view, the enablers of this technology can make a fair share of profit, while providing reliable service to the consumers (hopefully mostly for entertainment, not life or death situation).

China Mobile pic

Year 2007 result
China Mobile (CHL) released its year 2007 results on March 19 (PDF file here). Here are the highlights:

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iPhone deal, iPhone flip rumor

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I found AT&T offers iPhone 8GB refurb for $249. Here is the link. As of now the regular iPhone 8GB is $399 at Apple or AT&T store. I think one has to sign up the AT&T data plan to use some of the web features of iPhone. I could be wrong.

Also, I found this iPhone flip version rumor interesting (source: Sina). I understand the US consumers have a special love for flip phones. I personally switched to the SamSung A437 flip phone lately.

iPhone flip rumor

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HiPhone and iPhone new SDK

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Did you hear about HiPhone? It’s a knockoff iPhone made in China, here is one I found through Google Product search. Since US consumers are in recession (as wisely pointed out by Buffett and Bill Gross lately), this is not a bad choice if a person wants to impress his/her friends but don’t have the kind of money to buy a real iPhone ($399) or sign up the AT&T plan (starting $59.99) . In this case, the HiPhone costs $240, and no plan is required.

HiPhone photo

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Why I think China Mobile is a buy: I

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First a bit background.

Re-org of China telecom industry
All the big players: China Mobile 中国移动 (CHL), China Netcom (CN), China Telecom 中国电信(CHA) and China Unicom 中国联通 (CHU), are majority owned by the state. In the widely anticipated re-org plan, the goverment will try to create more competition in wireless arena (right now CHL is much bigger than CHU); and save the fixed line operators, as CHA and Netcom are losing landline subscription to mobile phones. China Unicom, currently the smaller rival of China Mobile, will sell its CDMA network to China Telecom, and meanwhile CHU (with its GSM network) will merge with China Netcom.

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iPhone, Blackberry

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Missing iPhones are found in China
According to InStat, a market research company, there are about 400,000 unlocked iPhone in China. Most of them are purchased in the US, unlocked and shipped to China later. An interesting side point is Chinese (smart phone) users are mostly for entertainment, while the US users focus on business functionality (email, etc., one reason Blackberry was so successful). Chinese translation from Xinhua:

根据市场分析企业In-Stat本周五最新发布的报告，全球共有80到100万台iPhone被解锁，使用在非苹果运营商合作伙伴的网络中。而其中仅中国就占到几乎半数。…

RIM lawsuit

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Blackberry down

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Yesterday one of the big news (Reuters) in the technology arena is the down of Blackberry (a.k.a., the Crackberry) email sevice in north America. This obviously has huge impact on the business and goverment users as they rely on device for email. But how could this happen? Isn’t blackberry supposed to be more reliable than the mobile phone network: one example is in 911, Dick Chenny got his Blackberry working while many cell phones users in White House and Congress stopped working.

Well, while the Blackberry is usually reliable, it is not perfect. According to the news, it appears the networking center of RIM had a glitch yesterday. As shown in the picture below, every email has to route through RIM’ networking center (or data center).

blackberry architecture pic
(source, Blackberry.com, a full size architecture picture can be seen here.)

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China Mobile, Nokia, Apple, Motorola

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I started pay attention to the mobile phone and service providers lately. In fact I bought some China Mobile (CHL) shares about 2 weeks ago (bought it a bit early again 🙂

Nokia: the balance
Nokia is the No. 1 brand in China as shown in baidu Shouji (cell phone) report. One thing I noticed during my last visit to Shanghai is Nokia set up a service center near Zhongshan park. Being in Midwest USA, I have not seen things like that and was a bit surprised. Why Nokia pay the extra attention to the customer services, now that they are already No. 1? One reason, I can think of, is they want to make sure their customers can get better services from authorized places, rather than going to those blackmarket and get their phones fixed.

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