The changing telecom landscape

via WikipediaDan Slater of Finance Asia gives a nice overview of the telecom industry now China Mobile's feathers are being ruffled. The restructering is having mostly winners, including the consumers, says Slater.

So it’s not too surprising that rivals and regulators are now kicking up a fuss. The fixed-line players don’t have mobile phone licenses in a global environment where voice and data services have long been converging on to mobile phone platforms. The problem is especially acute in China because a new generation of young people and rural users is jumping straight to the mobile phone, and ignoring landlines completely. As a result, the growth figures of China Telecom and China Netcom make dispiriting reading for their managers and shareholders. For China Netcom, earnings per share (EPS) dropped 1.15% in 2007 and at China Telecom they are down 15%. In contrast, the mobile phone players are doing much better. China Mobile’s EPS was up 31% last year, while China Unicom’s EPS went up 136% – even though China Unicom has been held back by running two different mobile phone standards.

More at Finance Asia.