Beijing. June 26. INTERFAX-CHINA - A China Mobile employee has called for a united front between the country's three telecom operators in order to challenge Apple's precondition on any iPhone deal with operators that it retain a high proportion of the revenues from the sale of iPhone applications.
Huang Yan, manager of the planning section of China Mobile's business support department, said that Apple's insistence on taking a large share of revenues from the sale of iPhone applications is a "threat to the value chain of China's telecom industry."
"Apple's revenue sharing plan relegates telecom operators to mere custodians of the network, and denies them adequate revenue to cover the huge amount of bandwidth that iPhone users require," Huang said.
Yan added that China Mobile ended negotiations with Apple due to Apple's demands for a high proportion of revenues from application sales.
"Although the three operators in China are competitors, we should be unanimous when our business model is being challenged," Huang said.
China Unicom is currently in talks with Apple over offering iPhone services in China. However, sources at China Unicom have told Interfax that the revenue-sharing plan being offered by Apple is below the operator's bottom line.
A Wi-Fi-disabled version of the iPhone is in the process of getting a network access license from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).
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