China Mobile has become the world’s first mobile operator to pass the half-billion subscriber mark.
The Chinese carrier yesterday said it had added 5.26 million new customers in August to take its total to 502.94 million.
The world’s largest operator by customer numbers, it continues to dominate growth in the mainland market, capturing 65% of all new mobile subscribers for the month.
However, growth is sluggish for its TD-SCDMA network, which attracted just 239,000 new customers. It now has 1.33 million customers on the network.
China Mobile’s most aggressive competitor is newcomer China Telecom, which added 2.08 million new cdma2000 subs to take its total to 43.81 million.
GSM provider China Unicom clocked up just 807,000 new customers to take its tally to 141.86 million.