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 Yan added that China Mobile ended negotiations with Apple due to Apple’s demands for a high proportion of revenues from application sales.
China Unicom is currently in talks with Apple over offering iPhone services in China. However, it has been suggested that the revenue-sharing plan being offered by Apple is below the operator’s bottom line.
iPhon Asia hurled itself into the fray by suggesting that this was some sort of price-fixing. "While China Mobile’s Huang Yan does not appear to be demanding fixed pricing, it’s somewhat perplexing that he is calling on all three major telecom operators to come together to challenge Apple."
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