Wan Mingjian, TCL's general director, said that tariffs on raw materials for mobile phones, especially CMOS chips, will be dropped as a result of WTO entry.

This will benefit domestic mobile phone companies, who traditionally import CMOS chips.

In fact, China's mobile phone market has been open to overseas companies for so many years that domestic companies have never been fully protected by state preferential policies.

Therefore, the WTO entry cannot negatively affect domestic mobile phone companies at all, Wan noted.

Currently, there are few technological differences between domestic mobile phones and those made overseas. In terms of function and price, the domestic mobile phones have the upper hand, Wu said.

The problem, according to Wu, is that some Chinese customers have blind faith in all things foreign, and it takes a long time for them to accept domestic products.

Currently, foreign mobile phone giants including Nokia, Motorola and Siemens claim over 70 percent of the market share in China.

But domestic mobile phone companies have developed rapidly in recent years, occupying the remaining 20-plus percent of the market.

Since the beginning of this year, more and more dealers and customers have started to buy domestic mobile phones. Sales of TCL mobile phones exceeded one billion yuan (about 125 million US dollars) during the first eight months of this year, nearly six- fold over the same period last year.

(Xinhua News Agency November 27, 2001)