The Buckingham

China Mobile Ltd. has double the size in subscribers than population in the United States, in the third-quarter they had a 1.3 percent gain. How did they do it? They provided cheap handsets and low rates on calls to all its subscribers.

According to Reuters, between July and September the China Mobile group earned about 31.1 billion yuan, $4.9 billion American dollars.  In the past year they have upgraded the full-year handset subsidies to 26 billion yuan, 6 billion more than what was expected.

Before money can come in, they needed to put out the money. In their first six months they spent 4.5 percent of revenue on this upgraded handset subsidies. Last Monday the China Mobile shares were higher by 1.1 percent.

Within the first nine months, China Mobile already exceeded the previous year’s earnings from 91.98 billion yuan to 93.31 billion yuan.

China has about 1 billion mobile phone users, about 80 percent of those users still operate on the much slower 2G network. The users using the 3G network around 10 percent.

China Mobile has less 3G users than china Telecom and China Unicom. The 3G network provided by China Mobile is not compatible with older iPhones. Luckily the iPhone 5 has the Qualcomm Inc chip that includes the TD-SCDMA standard needed by China Mobile.

China Mobile carries a variety of smart phones including the Android, HTC, and ZTE.