According to the industry insiders, after a long time preparation and development, MVNOs have finally ushered a key point by breaking through the 10 million subscribers mark in China.
But huge differences exist among the three major telcos. Among them, subscribers of mobile resale services reached 9 million in China Unicom, 1 million in China Telecom, while China Mobile has just started commercialization of its mobile resale services and has got only 100,000 subscribers.
Some people believed that China Unicom made great concessions to achieve this result, which gave a lot of development space to the MVNOs; but relevant personnel of China Unicom pointed out that the results were achieved mainly on its own strength and cooperation attitudes, rather than anything else.
As a model for the open of telecom industry, MIIT officially opened mobile resale services in the end of 2013. But most MVNOs haven’t formed clear profit models, and the wholesale prices are higher than the resale prices, subscribers are mainly of low-end users, the majority of enterprises haven’t started public allocation of numbers and other problems still exist. As a result, in the 42 companies that have got licenses, many still haven’t launched any products or services.