ASIA China : CCID Consulting released its latest Research Report on China's Mobile Phone Market, January-June 2007. It forecasts that mobile phone sales in China will reach 151.399 million sets in 2007, up 26.9% year-on-year, marking a continuous drop in growth rate.

The market of the next half of year will show the following trends: -- Mobile Phone Customization Deepens; Industry Integration Speeds up As operators offer more data services, the percentage of customized mobile phone sales will gradually rise year by year. CCID Consulting forecasts that the customized mobile phone will account for over a market share of 27% in 2011. As 3G networks increase bandwidth and transmission speed, there will be more and more data services including video, multimedia and application.

Because these data services have low cognition and acceptance among consumers, firms can only develop these services by staging customized mobile phone activities. Compared with customization in the 2.5G era, there are high hardware and software requirements for customized 3G products. This deepens the mobile phone customization model. Expanding customized mobile phone plays a more notable role in operators' control on the communication industry chain. While the scale of customization expands, operators will also develop from brand image customization to the in- depth customization model, thus necessitating big changes in the requirements for terminal vendors' mobile phone R&D and design.

Consequently, there is a bigger role in controlling and guiding terminal vendors. -- GPS Mobile Phone Has Great Growth Potentials; Expected to Formally Start Next Year In 2007, navigation mobile phone with the GPS positioning function received attention from various parties. Many mobile phone enterprises and design companies are making an effort to promote GPS navigation mobile phones. Nokia has sold the world's first navigation mobile phone N95. Samsung, BENQ, Siemens and other firms have also announced that they will make the GPS function the marketing point for their products this year. Home brands such as Amoi and Yulong CoolPAD etc, have also introduced their GPS navigation mobile phone.

China Mobile and China Unicom have also started to provide mobile phone navigation services. They have cooperated with digital map firms as well as mobile phone and chipset suppliers to introduce GPS into the mobile market. Compared with personal navigation devices (PND), GPS mobile phone provides navigation by receiving map data through wireless networks. CCID Consulting's data show that GPS navigation mobile phones currently have a market share of 2.3%. With the development of 3G, the GPS mobile phone market will continue to be promising. By 2011, its market share will reach 20%.