China Mobile Thrives On Big-Bang Growth

Most successful businesses are built one customer at a time.

A provider enters the market and competes with other, well-entrenched names. If you can make or do it better, maybe cheaper, you can thrive. That's how Anheuser-Busch's (NYSE:BUD) BUD Budweiser knocked off Ballantine. Give credit to Toyota TM, which is about to displace General Motors (NYSE:GM) GM as the world's biggest carmaker.

But that isn't the story of China Mobile CHL, that country's No. 1 provider of wireless phone services.

The mega-cap stock, which may be building a new base, is more a story of China's plunge into a free-market system. That big-bang economic transition created a huge pool of consumers. And they're buying cell phones.

So it's no wonder that China Mobile was a market leader in 2007, as well as '06, '05 and '04.

China Mobile has been putting up solid quarterly earnings growth since Q2 of 2005, especially considering the company's mammoth size. Estimates for the current quarter are for an 11% gain, which would be its slowest since Q1 of 2004.

Sales have been rising at a heady pace since Q3 of '04.