With continuous growth since July 2006, China Unicom is emerging as a prospective leading operator in China's mobile telecom industry, immediate after its giant rival China Mobile.
    
Achieving non-stop rise in the subscription of its GSM and CDMA services, China Unicom, the second largest mobile operator in China's mainland, attracted 373,000 more subscribers to its CDMA network in November 2006. This is said to be the largest month-on-month increase since July that year, according to the recent technology news on sina.com, China's largest Internet portal.

China Unicom's CDMA network covers more than 36 million users across the country. The GSM subscriptions of the company has also increased by 930,000 to top nearly 105 million, thus bringing the total number of the company's subscribers to about 143 million by the end of 2006. At the superior growth rate, China Unicom will have its user base expand to be larger than China Mobile's in the next few years.

As a major Chinese mobile operator currently second only to China Mobile, China Unicom reported a turnaround in its CDMA business in the first half of 2006, posting a pre-tax profit of 295 million yuan ($37.6 million), compared with a pre-tax loss of 482 million yuan for the same period in 2005. The company's CDMA network is promoted as featuring greater capacity with high quality and low radiation.

Industry experts said that achieving overall growth in the CDMA market is also one of the most formidable challenges that telecom operators have to face. All specific software attractions mean nothing unless they can reap significant sales rewards in this market. China Unicom remains very successful in attaining this market goal.

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