China Unicom targets sale of 150M devices in 2022

China Unicom has unveiled its plans for 2022, which involve selling 150 million devices and pursuing a new strategy that focuses on the digital economy.

The company revealed the plans at its annual partner conference Monday, but didn't elaborate on the device target, although it acknowledged it needed to expand relationships with partners in the development chain.

Figure 1: (Source: Reuters/Alamy Stock Photo)

The target covers handsets, smart home devices and industrial terminals, website C114 reported. Unicom said it expects to sell more smart home devices as part of the shift from traditional broadband to gigabit smart homes.

Digital transformation

Unicom and other state telcos are powerful players in the China device business, each ordering tens of millions of handsets every year, although they never disclose the total numbers shipped.

According to government figures, 248 million phones were sold in China in the first nine months of 2021. Last year 307.9 million handsets were shipped.

Unicom Chairman Liu Liehong also announced a new strategy with a tighter focus on the digital economy.

He said Unicom would "make deep and large connections with the digital world," with "big connectivity, big computing, big data, big applications and big security" at the center of its services.

It would expand its big data capabilities, with deeper integration with AI and blockchain, and accelerate business digitalization.

The telco would continue to develop "first-class 5G, gigabit broadband, enterprise and IoT networks to connect thousands of households, buildings, gardens, enterprises and factories," he said.

Liu said Unicom, the telco partner for next February's Winter Olympics, would "build a secure first line of defense in cyberspace" and be a "guardian of the new digital information infrastructure."

Outlook cloudy

The company also released the China Unicom "smart brain," its intelligent supercomputing cloud network engine, which would help forge cloud-network and computing-network integration.

Additionally, it unveiled the upgraded cloud-native China Unicom Cloud, which is now embedded with AI, blockchain and aPaaS (application-platform-as-a-service) components and capable of integrating digital intelligence into PaaS products to support billions of IoT connections.

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China Unicom and its two rivals have enjoyed a surge in demand for enterprise services in recent years.

Its industry Internet business is its fastest-growing segment with revenues up 25% in the first three quarters, accounting for 18% of Unicom service revenue.

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— Robert Clark, contributing editor, special to Light Reading