Two of the largest mobile operators in their country, China Unicom and China Mobile, have announced their intentions to bring near field communication (NFC) technology on a subscriber identity module (SIM) card foundation to their customers.
The GSM Association, which has made NFC standardization worldwide one of its primary goals, made the first announcement of the intentions of the two mobile operators in China to support NFC technology.
These two leading businesses in the Chinese marketplace are adding their names to 43 other mobile operators worldwide who have also declared their backing of products and services based on SIM with NFC, said the GSM Association.
As China’s total number of mobile connections has surpassed 940 million, this makes the adoption of NFC in the country quite a notable achievement. GSM Association data shows that the Chinese connections are greater than the total number in the United States and all of Europe combined.
According to the results of a GSM Association and A.T. Kearney study which were just released, by the end of 2011, it is estimated that among the 6 billion mobile subscribers in the world, half of them will be located in the Asia-Pacific region. As the head of this Asia Pacific surge in mobile connections, China has taken a highly important position in the industry.
Furthermore, the study also showed that by 2015, that region will have 4.1 billion connections and will make up approximately 40 percent of the mobile data traffic in the entire world. In 2010, China had the greatest number of mobile connections, with India in second place and Indonesia in third.
