Opening address from UTStarcom


- Mr. Hong Liang Lu, President of UTStarcom Inc. -

It's a great opportunity and great honor to have an opening speech. I'm going to mention a few words. I want to point out that PHS has been growing up at a very fast pace, as everybody has seen. Within half of this year in China, the number of subscribers, which was 500 million at the end of last year, has increased to about 900 million at the end of June. This is one of the fastest growth rates in any mobile industry. This success is attributed to a lot of people including PHS MoU Group as well as our operators in Japan and Taiwan. They have proved the fact that PHS is superior technology.

In fact in many areas including in China, if we say we are going to deploy PHS, it becomes a death word. You can't use the name PHS, because people think it is the bad technology. But it has been improved. Actually in our operations in Japan and Taiwan, PHS is really higher performing technology than many other systems. Particularly, we are competitive again GSM. In Taiwan the penetration rate of GSM is over 100% and in this situation PHS subscribers have exceeded 320,000 in only one year.

I attribute this success to many of our partners, because UTStarcom would not have been able to supply such good technology without them - partners such as SANYO, Kyocera, Mitsubishi, JRC and so on. Everybody believes in the PHS system. PHS is the one the best solutions to be provided to those people who have never used a mobile phone and those who are selecting a second mobile phone.

There are two major standards in the world, GSM and CDMA. And now 3G is coming. But 3G is very slow. So we want to make PHS the third standard in the world.