The Hong Kong-listed China Unicom has released its operational statistics for August 2008, showing that from January to August 2008, the net increase of the user number of China Unicom's GSM network was 8.896 million, increasing by 11.4% compared with July, and the total number of its GSM users reached 129 million.

However, the situation for its CDMA network was not as satisfactory. In the first eight months, the net increase of the user number of China Unicom's CDMA network was 431,000, a slowdown of 48% compared with the first seven months' 829,000 and the total number of the CDMA users was about 42.36 million.

The slowing user growth of China Unicom's CDMA network has been attributed to the lack of marketing activities because the development and investment in the network is also stopped. China Unicom said in a previous report that because of mergers, it was a crucial period for the CDMA network, so neither China Unicom nor China Telecom invested much in the marketing of the network's services.

China Telecom, the company that will take over the CDMA network, has started market surveys on CDMA users and also says it pays close attention to the user losses. Wang Xiaochu, president of China Telecom, says that the company will enter the China mobile market in February 2009 and invest CNY80 billion in the CDMA network in the next three years. According to the company's schedule, the number of its CDMA users will reach 100 million in two to three years and its market share will be over 15%.

At present, the number of China Unicom's CDMA users is 43.17 and its market share is 7%.