The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China (MIIT) published a report on the communications industry in 2009. The report shows by the end of last year, 3G network users reached 13.25 million. The three 3G operators—China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom—invested 160.9 billion yuan ($23.5 billion) to build the network, which indirectly contributed 589 billion yuan ($709 billion) to the economy and drove 36.4 billion yuan ($5.33 billion) worth of consumption.

MIIT issued 3G licenses to the three operators in early 2009. Each operator was responsible for developing a separate 3G network. China Mobile was given responsibility for the Chinese standard TD-SCDMA; China Unicom developed the internationally accepted WCDMA; and China Telecom adopted the CDMA200-EVDO standard.

The independently developed 3G network—China Mobile's TD-SCDMA—attracted 5.51 million users. The number of new China Telecom users grew by 100.97 percent, the fastest in 2009. MIIT estimated that China Telecom's CDMA200-EVDO standard also attracted about 5 million users last year. The number of China Unicom's WCDMA users was 2.74 million.

3G businesses have already grabbed a large piece of the pie in the largely 2G dominated market, but have not significantly driven economic development. Analysts said 3G will take effect this year along with the perfection of the networks and people's acceptance of the new service.

Wang Jianzhou, President of China Mobile, said his company is striving to multiply and enrich the content for terminal users of not just mobile phones but also netbooks, electronic reading devices and home gateway systems.