UPDATE:China Mobile Says Mainland Listing Is Biggest Plan For 2011
March 04 2011 - 8:27AM
Dow Jones News
China Mobile Ltd.'s (CHL) biggest plan for this year is to list
in mainland China, but the specific timing of a listing depends on
regulators who are forming a plan for the country's so-called "red
chip" companies to return to the mainland market, China Mobile
Chairman Wang Jianzhou said Friday.
Red chips are companies that have most of their assets in
mainland China, but are registered and listed overseas--typically
in Hong Kong. China doesn't allow companies registered overseas to
list their shares on the mainland's exchanges at present, though
the government has said it plans to change this.
The remarks come as red-chip companies, like China Mobile and
Alibaba.com Ltd. (1688.HK), have said they're considering mainland
listings.
China Mobile could list via A-shares, Chinese Depositary
Receipts or on an international board, Wang said on the sidelines
of government meetings in Beijing. It plans to list the whole
company, not through a special purpose vehicle, the chairman has
said previously .
Wang also said Apple Inc. (AAPL) Chief Executive Steve Jobs is
interested in fourth-generation LTE mobile technology and is
willing to develop an iPhone using it.
Apple didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.
There has been no new progress in China Mobile's talks with
Apple, Wang said. The company has said for years it is talking with
Apple about offering the U.S. company's popular iPhone smartphones
in China. China Mobile is competing with other Chinese mobile
operators including China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd. (CHU), the
country's second-biggest operator, to offer attractive smart phones
on the Chinese market.
China Unicom's Chief Executive Chang Xiaobing said Friday on the
sidelines of the same meetings that his company hopes to speed up
its introduction of Apple's (AAPL) iPad tablet computers in China
but has no specific time-table.
Apple already sells the iPad in China, but only versions without
third-generation mobile connectivity, and China Unicom doesn't yet
offer the devices. Unicom, the sole telecom carrier to offer the
iPhone in mainland China, said last year it hopes to offer the iPad
as soon as possible.
China Unicom is experimenting with fourth-generation mobile
technology, Chang said, but didn't elaborate. Telecom operators
worldwide are deploying or preparing to deploy 4G networks to offer
faster data services and higher revenue per user than services
using older technology.
So far, China Mobile is the only Chinese carrier to have
announced tests of 4G technology. The company said in December it
would start large-scale testing of TD-LTE technology, the variation
of LTE that China Mobile is promoting.
The large-scale tests are now about to start, Wang said on
Friday.
-By Owen Fletcher, Lily Sun and Eliot Gao, Dow Jones Newswires;
8610 8400 7702; owen.fletcher@dowjones.com
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