What are the advantages and disadvantages of China Mobile and China Unicom?

Comparison of Development Strategies China Mobile and China Unicom are the two major operators in China mobile market. Because of their different time to enter the market, there are obvious differences in business operation, network scale, operating characteristics and many other aspects. See table 1: overall comparison between China Mobile and China Unicom. Due to the above differences, their development strategies are also different. The comparison of the development strategies of the two companies in 2005 is shown in Table 2: Comparison of the strategic business development of China Mobile and China Unicom in 2005 ☆ Comparison of main businesses: The main businesses of China Mobile and China Unicom are mobile voice services, which are mainly divided into prepaid and post-paid services. Comparison of services: Comparison of main services between China Mobile and China Unicom China Mobile's "Global Connect" service is a brand that has been operating for many years. It not only has good network coverage, accurate and perfect billing and good service quality, but also realizes roaming in many regions of the world. The users of "Shenzhouxing" account for 60% of mobile users in China. Because of its advantages in network coverage, it is very popular with users. "M-Zone" locates users in independent, independent, fashionable and trendy youth groups. At present, it has formed a strong brand appeal, but its connotation is insufficient, the tariff is single and the content is not much. China Unicom's "130" (GSM network130, 13 1) brand is weak, and there has never been a clear positioning, planning and publicity. The brand "Unicom New Space-Time" has a certain influence, but compared with "GSM", the users of CDMA are smaller and the development is not ideal. "UP New Force" is only piloted in some provinces (cities), and brand building is at a disadvantage, with problems such as insufficient network coverage and fee division (no tips outside campus, etc.). ), and users often switch to the network. For Ruyitong (GSM 130,13 and CDMA 133), China Unicom adopted the principle of low-key development, and determined four packages to meet the needs of some low-end customers at the initial stage of launch, attracting them through market self-communication and publicity, plus its10. However, the development of CDMA 133 Ruyitong is not satisfactory due to the high price and backward style of mobile phones, and the future is not optimistic. Generally speaking, China Unicom is at a disadvantage compared with China Mobile in business development. Therefore, in the future business development, China Unicom should focus on solving the following problems: repositioning, the user base of "130" business should focus on the middle and low end, and "Unicom New Time and Space" should face the middle and high end. For the "UP new forces", the focus in 2005 should be to promote construction and market development on a large scale, including formulating various tariff packages and promotion measures. Ruyitong GSM needs to be positioned at the low end, while CDMA 133 Ruyitong needs to be transformed into a higher-end prepaid brand. ☆ The voice service market of mobile value-added services tends to be saturated gradually, and the number of low-end users (prepaid) increases, which leads to the phenomenon that voice services increase without increasing revenue. In this case, mobile operators regard mobile value-added services as new business growth points and revenue growth points. In recent years, China Mobile and China Unicom have launched a number of mobile value-added services (see Table 4 for comparison), which have contributed to their overall income and enabled users to enjoy more colorful services. Comparison of mobile value-added services between China Mobile and China Unicom In 2005, the market scale of mobile value-added services will continue to expand. For example, the market scale of SMS, MMS and WAP services will reach 40.7 billion yuan, 654.38+0.8 billion yuan and 654.38+0.43 billion yuan respectively, which will become an important source of income for mobile operators. In the next 2-3 years, the growth of SMS business will gradually decline. If the 3G market is open, SMS will enter the adjustment period. At present, the penetration rate of short message service is very high, so it is necessary to tap new users and applications. The MMS market will begin to expand to industrial applications. With the improvement of users' awareness, registered users of MMS will continue to grow at a high speed. With the increase of WAP potential market, the increasingly mature consumption environment, the clear charging standard and the popularization of consumption threshold, WAP users and market scale will continue to expand. In 2005, the number of CRBT users will continue to grow at a high speed and will develop into a scale; Adjusting tariffs has become an inevitable trend for CRBT services to continue to develop. Because CRBT users have a wide range of choices and tend to be scattered, content innovation has become the key. Compared with the competitive strength, China Unicom entered the market later than China Mobile. In order to support China Unicom, the government has given it a series of preferential policies, including: the only full-service operator; Business charges can fluctuate within the national standards10%-20%; Operating GSM and CDMA services at the same time. However, from the comparison of market share in all aspects, it can be seen that the comprehensive competitive strength of China Unicom is obviously inferior to that of China Mobile (as shown in Table 5), and it cannot compete with China Mobile in the short term. Comparison of market share between China Mobile and China Unicom From the analysis of user composition, China Unicom has more low-end users. Take prepaid users as an example. In 2004, the market share of China Unicom was 60.67%, while that of China Mobile was only 39.33%. China Unicom accounted for 24.78% and China Mobile for 75.22%. Because most of the high-end users are controlled by China Mobile, the lack of high-end users makes the profitability of China Unicom worse than that of China Mobile. From the comparison of other business income and short message service market share, we can see that China Unicom has not formed the ability to compete with China Mobile not only in the mobile voice market, but also in the mobile value-added service market, and the gap is even greater. PHS, a fixed operator, will squeeze the market space of China Mobile and China Unicom and weaken its competitiveness after entering the market, especially after realizing the short message intercommunication with China Mobile and China Unicom and the separation of machine and card. In addition, if 3G enters the market, it will also bring greater challenges to the competitiveness of China Mobile and China Unicom. User development comparison 1999-2004, the mobile users of China Mobile and China Unicom showed an upward trend (as shown in figure 1), but the growth rate showed a gradual downward trend (as shown in figure 2). According to the latest research report of visiongain, the number of users of China Mobile will increase to 386 million in 2005 and reach 580 million in 20 10. The overall growth of users mainly comes from the central and western regions, and the overall slowdown is mainly due to the market saturation in developed regions. Comparing the two operators, the growth rate of China Unicom is higher than that of China Mobile, which is mainly driven by the growth of CDMA users. From the analysis of user structure, whether it is China Mobile or China Unicom, post-paid users are still dominant, but the proportion of prepaid users is on the rise, especially among the new users, there are more prepaid users. Low-end users have become the main source of user growth in the mobile market. The high-end users of China Mobile are relatively stable, while the growth rate of new users of China Unicom is declining. An important reason is that the growth of CDMA users has slowed down, far below market expectations. Compared with CDMA users, GSM users of China Unicom still dominate, exceeding 73% in 2004, while CDMA users only account for about 26%. In 2005, CDMA users will continue to increase, but the dominant position of GSM will not be shaken, and it will still be the main source of income and profit. Among CDMA users, since China Unicom initially positioned users at the high end, by 2004, the proportion of post-paid users exceeded 92.84%. With the adjustment of China Unicom's CDMA development policy, the proportion of prepaid users will increase in the future. Compared with the current mobile phone payment, there are two main ways of service charge, one is prepaid, and the other is post-payment. In terms of fees, prepaid users are divided into roaming (used in the city) and roaming (used in other parts of China). For example, the cost pairs of various services of the two operators are shown in Table 6. The comparison of various business tariffs shows that the average tariff of China mobile service is higher than that of China Unicom, which makes China Unicom have certain advantages in price. It is worth mentioning that due to the intensification of competition (such as PHS), in many areas, mobile services have shown a one-way charging trend, and the price competition between operators is becoming increasingly fierce. Because China Unicom has more business types than China Mobile, relatively speaking, it has more room for price adjustment and change than China Mobile. Comparison of China Mobile and China Unicom's mobile service charges and capital operation With the acceleration of the marketization process of the two major mobile operators, more and more capital operation modes are used to raise funds needed for development. Tables 7 and 8 show various capital operations conducted by China Mobile since 1994 and China Unicom since 2000. In the future, both China Mobile and China Unicom intend to expand their capital operation overseas and gradually enter the international market through acquisitions, so as to seek greater development space. Comparison of capital operation and capital expenditure between China Mobile and China Unicom over the years With the transformation of telecom industry from extension to connotation, the capital expenditure of mobile operators shows a downward trend year by year. For example, the capital expenditure of China Mobile will continue to decline from 2003 to 2007 (as shown in Figure 3); Among them, the investment for scale expansion will decrease, and the expenses for business expansion, research and development, market development and network efficiency will increase. Table 9 shows the direction and amount of capital expenditure of China Mobile and China Unicom in 2005. Comparison of investment income between China Mobile and China Unicom in 2005 In the income structure of China Mobile in 2004, voice business income still dominated, and the growth of new business income was much higher than that of voice business income, accounting for the highest level in history, accounting for 15.72%, which was close to the level of mobile operators in some developed countries. Among them, the data services represented by SMS, WAP and CRBT developed more rapidly, and the proportion of the total revenue increased from 7.7% in 2003 to 1 1.3% in 2004 (see Figure 4 for details). In 2005, voice service will still account for a large part of revenue, but the growth will continue to slow down. Mobile value-added services, especially CRBT, MMS, WAP and other revenue growth rate is the largest. Due to factors such as policy adjustment, the growth of SMS will decline. In 2004, the business revenue of China Unicom continued to grow, among which the growth of CDMA revenue was higher than that of GSM, and the proportion of mobile value-added services in the total mobile business revenue increased from 5.0% in 2003 to 10.2%, while the revenue of long-distance services, data services and Internet services declined (see Figure 5 for details). In 2005, the income proportion of CDMA and mobile value-added services will further expand, while the income proportion of GSM and long distance, data and Internet services will decrease. MMS, CRBT, WAP, mobile data, location, streaming media and other services will continue to expand their contribution to revenue. Due to low-end new users, intensified price war and low proportion of new services, the ARPU of users of China Mobile and China Unicom continued to decline from 2000 to 2004 (Figure 6). Both post-paid and pre-paid users show this trend. As the Ministry of Information Industry has stricter supervision on telecom tariffs, the ARPU of users of China Mobile and China Unicom has slowed down, and it is expected that ARPU will gradually stabilize in 2005. On the other hand, the improvement of PHS competitiveness may further weaken the ARPU of users of China Mobile and China Unicom. From 2000 to 2004, the ARPU of China Mobile and China Unicom were both higher than that of China Unicom, and the gap between them further widened. To some extent, the profitability of China Unicom is weaker and weaker than that of China Mobile. How to improve profitability is a problem that China Unicom should consider and solve in 2005. Taking China Unicom as an example, the ARPU of CDMA users is higher than that of GSM users, mainly due to the small base of CDMA users. With the increase of CDMA users (especially ordinary CDMA users), the gap between them will gradually narrow.