China Mobile, the world’s largest cellular operator, has an answer for Chinese consumers impatient to get their hands on Apple’s iPhone. The market has plenty of pirated and smuggled iPhones but Apple hasn’t concluded a deal with a Chinese carrier to carry legitimate versions of the hot handset. So China Mobile, which had negotiated unsuccessfully with Apple to launch the iPhone, has an offer for its users: Can’t wait for the iPhone? Try the OPhone instead.
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The operator and the big-name electronics companies it has lined up as partners hope consumers won’t care much about the one-vowel difference. China Mobile is planning to roll out a series of smartphones that operate on Android, the operating system promoted by Google. Android is an open-source OS, leading China Mobile to dub its phones using the software OPhones. Another important difference between China Mobile’s offering and Apple’s: Lots of companies will be making the OPhone. Among the big-name players working on producing OPhones for China Mobile are Dell, Philips, LG, and Samsung.
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China Mobile could use a boost. With 493 million subscribers, the company has more than 70 percent of the Chinese cellular market, well ahead of rivals China Unicom and China Telecom, but it is facing growing competition now that the Chinese government, after many delays, has finally opened the country to 3G networks. The stock price is up just 6.5 percent this year, compared to a 17 percent rise for Unicom, a 32 percent increase for Telecom, and a 41 percent jump for the benchmark Hang Seng index. On Aug. 20, China Mobile reported that second-quarter earnings fell 1.6 percent to $4.4 billion on an 8.9 percent rise in sales to $31.2 billion.
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That’s the first drop in profit in a decade — and makes it all the more important for China Mobile to…