China Telecom Takes Over Unicom

China Telecom Corporation Ltd. will acquire the stake China United Telecommunications Ltd. holds in Unicom-BREW Telecommunication Technologies.

Unicom-BREW is a service provider joint venture between China Unicom and Qualcomm Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM), the world' leader of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) digital wireless technology. It is engaged in the development of CDMA value-added services.

Mobile phone positioning, particularly, mobile phone navigation, has been a pillar value-added business of the CDMA network. China Unicom has been supporting CDMA positioning products developers like PDAger Mobility Inc. in recent years. The latter' trial users approach 1 million, and subscribers 100,000.

After China Telecom takes over China Unicom' CDMA network, it will focus on CDMA value-added business, especially, GPS. The core business of GPS is navigation map service. ZTE Corporation has won the bid for building GPS platforms around China.