Heavyweight network vendor Huawei Technologies is also making a play for the handset market.
The privately-held firm tips its domestic handset sales will top 1 billion yuan ($1.48b) this year, according to Chinese website CCID.
Yang Xiaozhong, the head of Huawei’s China terminals division, said the company shipped 7.4 billion yuan worth of devices last year and has already passed the 5 billion mark in 2010.
Huawei unveiled three new EVDO smartphones and new EVDO Rev B USB dongles at an industry forum last week.
The new phones are the C8600, an EVDO Rev A smartphone based on Android 2.1 OS, the C8300 dual-mode handset, which uses Window Mobile, and the C6200, which comes with a hard keyboard.
Tang Xinhong, president of Huawei’s CDMA, Wimax, and TD-SCDMA business group, said prices would be set by the operators.
He said the company plans to roll out 35 new CDMA models, including ten “Music” series phones, five types of “Qwerty” handsets, and five “Smart" series devices.
Huawei last year shipped 17.9 million CDMA phones to operators such as Tata, Reliance and Bakrie, with 5.4 million sold in Asia (excluding China) 1.8 million in Latin America and 8 million elsewhere.
It says it has sold more than 1 million TD-SCDMA phones in the first six months of this year. Tan said it will introduce eight new TD-SCDMA phones as well as an Ophone - China Mobile’s version of Android OS - in the second half of 2010.
“We will follow the“8+3” product strategy this year, which means we will launch eight types of handsets deeply customized for China Mobile and three types of handset by ourselves,” Tang told telecomasia.net.
Research firm Analysis Mason predicts that the number of smartphones in use worldwide will grow at an annual rate of 32% between 2010 and 2014. Most of this growth will be generated in developing markets in Asia and Latin America.
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