China will launch a two-year trial for private firms to provide mobile services to users, ending the monopoly of state-owned carriers in the nation’s telecommunications sector, Bloomberg reported. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Thursday proposed the initiative online, which will allow private Chinese companies to acquire mobile network bandwidth from current carriers and rename the services before marketing them to users. Beijing will support private capital injections to bolster network quality in the mobile services industry, the ministry said. The development follows China’s State Council’s pronouncement in May 2010 that it would encourage competition and private investment in the telecommunications sector. Foreign investment in the mobile services sector is limited to minority share holdings in listed Hong Kong units of mainland operators.
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