China's top three integrated telecom carriers have not unveiled their specific investment plans for 2010 yet, Xu Zhiqun (transliterated), senior vice president for Alcatel Shanghai Bell Co., Ltd., the flagship unit of Alcatel-Lucent in China, recently disclosed at a research conference.

Domestic telecom operators will hold cautious attitudes toward network expansion in the coming three years, noted the senior vice president, adding that telecom carrier's investment decreases will result in big impacts on telecom equipment suppliers.

Telecom carriers, which had issued investment plans for the coming year at this same time of previous years, still keep silent at the moment perhaps due to their economic power. In the first half of 2009, China Unicom incurred an about 40% decline in net profits; China Telecom suffered an approximate 50% decrease; while China Mobile scored a 1.4% increase.

According to the latest data offered by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the three telecom carriers had accumulatively injected CNY 96.1 billion into 3G.

Telecom carriers input plenty money into 3G network construction but saw limited increases in 3G users. Thus, most of their bandwidth resources were unused, which would restrict telecom operators' further investments, pointed out an expert in the telecom industry.

Although telecom carriers' investments in future will restrict equipment development, telecom equipment manufacturers still face opportunities arising from the CNY 4 trillion economic stimulus package, industry & informationization integration, e-administration, as well as next-generation broadcasting (NGB), said Xu Zhiqun. Communications and related investments in the non-telecom-carrier markets will amount to CNY 200 billion or so during the period from 2010 to 2012, forecasted Xu.

Looking ahead, Shanghai Bell plans to focus on its core operations and outsource back technical support, proposals, and terminals to its partners, according to Mr. Xu.

An government official from Shanghai also mention the situation of the city's telecom market at the conference, saying that the telecom and network equipment manufacturing industry strive to seek annual production value of CNY 120 billion in 2012 in an attempt to grow into one of the most vigorous and creative industries of the city.

The city's electronic information product manufacturing industry gained production value of CNY 616.3 billion in total in 2008, rising 11.5% from the previous year. Notably, the telecom equipment manufacturing sector obtained production value of CNY 85.6 billion, jumping 72.7% year on year.