China Mobile, the worlds largest cellphone carrier with over 900 million subscribers on last count has been repeatedly showing interest in the Apple iPhone. If you remember Appel and China Mobile couldn’t agree on terms for getting the phone offering from Cupertino on the worlds largest carrier. Apparently China Mobile wanted to tap the App Store and take a share in revenues from Apple’s App market. However things have long changed. Wang Jianzhou, China Mobile’s Chairman recently announced that they already have 10 million iPhone users on their network, without a formal tie-up with Apple or subsidy. That is a huge number. We always knew the grey market for iPhones in China is huge.
Apple has signed China Unicom since long and that was easier for Apple as China Unicom runs on GSM infrastructure, which was the only one supported until 2010 end by Apple. In early 2011, Apple released a CDMA version of iPhone 4 raising rumors of iPhone’s release across a lot of CDMA carriers across the globe. China Mobile implements a TD-SCDMA standard for 3G that it said to be home grown. This might have increased Apple’s challenges in providing an iPhone to the state owned China Mobile.
China is an important market for Apple with over 12% of its revenues coming from the Asian giant. It is certain that Apple would want to get official with the largest Chinese carrier as soon as possible. While we have heard comments from China Mobile about Apple agreeing to work on an TD-LTE smartphone for China, we wonder if the iPhone 4S would work with them? For an LTE iPhone, Apple would have to wait till the 6th generation iPhone to come out. That isn’t happening anytime soon for sure.
The 4S uses Qualcomm’s MDM6610 baseband and while we are not certain if that supports TD-SCDMA already (though 4S is a world phone), we know that Qualcomm holds license to the TD-SCDMA standard and claims royalties on that product. If Apple manages to pull a rabbit out of their hat and gets a TD-SDCDMA iPhone 4S working for China Mobile, it would mean a super boost in iPhone sales. China is as it is Apple’s fastest growing market and they would love to get a shot in the arm with the iPhone.
We might well be connecting the leads backwards on a later date where China Mobile’s Chairman slipped and revealed about the LTE iPhone being prepared for China Mobile or when Tim Cook was spotted in China. But for now, we can be somewhat certain, China Mobile is getting the iPhone, would it be the 4S supporting TD-SCDMA or another model supporting TD-LTE is the question.