China Mobile currently provides full communications services in all 31 provinces, autonomous regions, and directly-administered municipalities throughout Mainland China and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. As the leading telecommunications provider, it has the world's most extensive mobile network and the world's most massive mobile customer base. One in every three 4G mobile users in the world is a China Mobile customer.
Achieving these milestones was not easy. China Mobile built its infrastructure where there was none and rewired the existing infrastructure for the modern connected era. It also created a healthy ecosystem of partners, established strong relationships with various local and international telecommunication players, deployed new industry-leading technologies that empower users to do more with their smartphones, and brought China businesses to a new level of connectivity.
China Mobile is also leading the charge toward new opportunities in the Connected Era, such as smart city development, smart energy innovation, and smart manufacturing innovation. It already manages over 150 million IoT connections, with NB-IoT infrastructures in 346 cities around the globe. Leading companies rely on the Group for communications, IoT, internet, digitalization and business support.
Exporting the China Experience
China Mobile's broad experience and its vast pool of expertise will be crucial as local enterprises look to take advantage of OBOR. The proven methodologies and strategies to leapfrog China's infrastructure gaps will be vital for enterprises looking to overcome similar gaps in OBOR-associated countries.
To help local enterprises, China Mobile established China Mobile International (CMI) as the international wing of the Group. After its founding in December 2010, CMI expanded its footprint in 23 countries across different regions, including the United Kingdom, US, Canada, Singapore, Japan, etc.
More importantly, CMI aims to be a trusted partner for local enterprises looking to navigate OBOR challenges across the Asia Pacific, European and African continents. With a vast network of its own data centers in Singapore, the US, the UK and others, a total of 40T bandwidth transmitted globally, over 40 land and submarine cables and over 170+ POPs, it aims to support global expansion. In the UK market, CMI officially opened its Data Centre in the UK in 2019 December. As a purpose-built data centre, the new building is CMI's first data centre in Europe and important addition to its growing global network. Serving as both an International Network Exchange hub and an Internet Data Centre (IDC), the UK Data Centre supports the 'Belt and Road' initiative by providing connectivity and enabling closer ties between Asia and Europe.
Local enterprises can easily subscribe to CMI's full range of one-stop enterprise solutions- iSolutions. These include ICT Solutions, cross-border connectivity solutions, Data Center, Cloud Solutions, IoT solutions etc. They can also take advantage of CMI's investments in SD-WAN, Cloud Connect and other innovations to overcome infrastructure challenges and workaround connectivity issues. CMI also launched its cloud-network integration solution- mCloud, giving multinational enterprises a one-stop solution with self-service deployment and the ability to manage all their cloud and network products on a single platform that makes cloud services more visible, accessible and manageable. Together, they allow enterprises to focus on maximizing OBOR-related opportunities and expanding their business and worrying less about connectivity and infrastructure. In turn, CMI will manage the internet connectivity, content distribution, data transmission and other related issues for its clients.
Business Catalyst
CMI is not sitting on its laurels. It is looking to be both an industry catalyst for digital transformation and a vertical industry enabler as OBOR matures.
As an industry catalyst, CMI is looking to use its “big connectivity” strategy to drive big data analytics, cloud computing, smart devices, IoT, 5G mobile terminals and other technologies. It is already working with other industry players on digitalization and IoT.
On the vertical front, CMI is looking to drive innovation within specific industries, such as logistics, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, etc. Through end-to-end solutions, complete communication and content application infrastructure, and network and cloud transformation, it is looking to drive industry efficiency to whole new levels.
