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In 2008, CMMB (China Multimedia Mobile Broadcasting), the Chinese-developed digital mobile broadcasting standard, grew quickly in China with the backing of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) and its trial use during the Olympics.

Now, with the turf war over CMMB between SARFT and the telecom regulator, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), seemingly put to rest with the announcement last month that MIIT had finally granted network access licenses to handsets integrating CMMB technology, the standard looks set to take off in 2009.

CMMB (China Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting) mobile TV signals now cover 150 cities in China, CMMB mobile TV operator China Satellite Mobile Broadcasting Corp. (CSMBC) announced on Jan. 19.

As of Jan. 13, CMMB network deployment had been completed in 113 cities, in addition to the initial 37 cities where CMMB was trialed. Network upgrade and optimization for the 37 trial cities will kick off in the next few months, according to CSMBC.

China Mobile will begin the third phase of its TD-SCDMA network equipment tender on Jan. 20, and plans to complete project construction by the end of July 2009, a source within China Mobile told Interfax on Jan. 19.

According to the unnamed source, the third phase of the TD-SCDMA network equipment tender for 162 cities is valued at RMB 58.8 billion ($8.6 billion), and is being brought forward from the original planned date in March. The result of the tender is expected in March, which is the same time second phase network construction in 28 cities is due to be completed, three months ahead of schedule.

A few days ago, one of the leading domestic mobile phone manufacturers ZTE Corporation announced its 100,000,000th set of mobile phone to have gotten off the production line in Shenzhen. It's the first time for domestic mobile phone's accumulative sales volume to exceed 100 million sets, demonstrating ZTE has entered into the "first camp" of global mobile phone manufacturers successfully.

As to the annual sales volume of mobile phone, from 12 million sets in 2005 to 16 million sets in 2006, and to 31.06 million sets in 2007, ZTE's mobile phone business realized "hop, skip and jump" in three years, and its income and profit both grew substantially. Comparatively, the market shares of domestic mobile phones, however, were shrinking gradually meanwhile from 60 percent in the peak period to lower than 30 percent in 2007. Looking back at the development course of ZTE mobile phone, we found that ZTE can always stand erect tide head and deal with difficulties flexibly before every market change.