Statistics provided by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology show that by the end of 2008, the number of China's wireless local phone users had decreased to 68.931 million.
China's wireless local phone users are mainly personal access system users and a few SCDMA users. Compared with 2007, the year 2008 saw an even greater decrease in wireless local phone users. In 2007, the number of PAS users across China decreased by 6.085 million to 84.544 million and its proportion in fixed line users decreased from 24.6% to 23.1% during the year. In 2008, the number of PAS users in China further decreased by 15.631 million to 68.931 million.
In addition, the accumulated number of calls made through wireless local phones was 154.62 billion in 2008, a year-on-year decrease of 10.7%.
Because of the large decrease of PAS user number in 2007, the total number of fixed line users also showed negative growth in 2007 and the two major Chinese fixed line operators, China Telecom and China Netcom basically stopped investments in PAS. In addition, the continuous decline of PAS user number made China Unicom announce in its performance report for 2008 that the company has made preparation to reduce its PAS assets.
