They have just about equal market share. Certainly, China has been a very important market for these companies. And these companies, in turn, have been instrumental in bringing sophisticated communications to the Chinese. Demand is high for wireless services. China Unicom alone is adding more than 200,000 subscribers per week.
Prepaid services are one new marketing tool.
When it was introduced in Taiwan, it doubled the growth in the first couple of months. It hit a new market of people who were on the ragged edge of whether they could afford the commitment of signing a year-long contract. Two drawbacks of this strategy, however, are the lack of stability that traditional one-year contracts offer providers, and the provider's inability to identify its customers for market development purposes. Based on the experience of modest per capita income markets like Italy and Portugal, Harr Brickson is watching China's prepaid services closely. Those markets have 80 to 90 percent prepaid subscribers, which shows the effect prepaid services can have in an economy in which people don't have a lot of disposable income.