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Dow Jones Business News:China Unicom Adds 1.127 Million CDMA Subscribers In January
Thursday February 19, 7:03 am ET


HONG KONG -(Dow Jones)- China Unicom Ltd. (NYSE:CHU - News) said Thursday that growth in its client base for its code division multiple access network slipped slightly in January, coinciding with the Lunar New Year holiday.

China's second-biggest mobile phone company had net additions of 1.127 million subscribers to its CDMA network in January, down from December's increase of 1.163 million.

The company decided in early 2003 to scale back its handset subsidies to help it with its profitability target. Later in the year, it launched a prepaid system and started buying CDMA handsets in bulk at lower prices, in an attempt to cut customers' costs and stimulate demand.

Of its 1.127 million new CDMA subscribers last month, 1.02 million were for its postpaid service and 107,000 were prepaid service users.

China Unicom said it added 982,000 clients to its bread-and-butter GSM - or global system for mobile communications - mobile-phone network in January. In December, it added a net 815,000 GSM subscribers.

By the end of January, China Unicom had a total of 73.552 million GSM clients and 20.073 million CDMA users.

-By John Ryan, Dow Jones Newswires; 852-2802-7002; [e-mail]

-Edited by John Viljoen




http://biz.yahoo.com/djus/040219/0703000518_2.html