Stir Fried China

China Mobile announced their third quarter results yesterday, as well as one little, small tidbit of a milestone – they just passed half a billion subscribers. However, even with 508 million users and plans to have 3G networks set up in 238 cities by the end of the year, China Mobile is still facing stiff competition from both China Telecom and China Unicom, the later gearing up to launch the iPhone 3G & 3GS in Q4 (which should be a boom for content providers such as QQ). Bloomberg has more info and analysis on the results.

To fight back, China Mobile is going to release a Lenovo built, Andriod powered 3G iPhone challenger called Miro (here’s Lenovo’s kind of silly and really slow to load promotional site for Miro) – the OS is called OPhone – and if it does well, it could not only be a boon for China Mobile and Lenovo, but also a strong endoresment of Andriod, especially in the world’s largest mobile phone market (heck, China Mobile alone has more subscribers than there are people in North America). That said, the impact that the iPhone is going make is going to be hard for China Mobile to cushion, and I expect China Unicom to see significant gains over the next year.