SHENZHEN, CHINA –- ZTE Corporation, a leading global provider of telecommunications equipment and network solutions, today announced that it has successfully assisted China Unicom to launch China’s multi-platform, multi-device App Store called the “WoStore”.

The online application service is built entirely by ZTE and will support all open smartphone platforms except for iPhone, as well as terminal devices such as tablet PCs and MID (mobile Internet device).

Leveraging on China Unicom’s extensive range of 3G terminals and rich mobile applications, the WoStore is an important part of the company’s 3G portfolio. “Wo” is a 3G brand created by China Unicom to reach out to its mobile phone users.

Looking to the best practices of global leading AppStores and combining them with its own strengths and mobile experience, China Unicom aimed to create a sound system for the industry and developers. It invited mainstream equipment manufacturers of the industry to participate in a rigorous bidding and internal testing process. The bid to build the system was finally won by ZTE Corporation who can provide a reliable solution at an affordable price. “The WoStore, jointly built by ZTE and China Unicom, is based on ZTE’s AppStore platform, which is highly usable and transplantable, and can realise customisation in connection with the operator’s actual needs,” said Yu Yifang, Vice President, ZTE Corporation.

“ZTE is optimistic about the cooperation with China Unicom, and we believe that the partnership will also help to promote this AppStore model globally.”

WoStore will present itself to the public in the form of two modules: “Online Store” and “Developer’s Community”.

The “Online Store” includes functional modules such as user’s gateway, user management, merchandise management, transaction management and business support. It is the gateway for mobile phone users to discover and use mobile applications. Users can log on to access it through the web, WAP, mobile phone client, or PC client.

The “Developer’s Community” mainly includes functional modules such as user’s gateway, information exchange, cooperation management, applications management, and service support. It can provide rich application development resources, powerful support for application development, and a sound development communication environment for personal developers or institutional developers.

This will reduce the technical threshold for personal/institutional developers and allow developers to nurture and incubate more sophisticated and better applications for mobile users.

Statistics show that in June this year China Unicom’s 3G WCDMA users grew by 1.032 million, the total 3G users reached 7.56 million. Most of them were high-end users with strong purchasing power. China Unicom’s total mobile phone users exceeded 149 million.

At the same time, China Unicom and ZTE will support nearly 1,000 WCDMA handset models through the customised AppStore, to fully tap the advantage of WCDMA via a wide variety of terminals available.

The two parties will also reinforce the transaction function of this platform to provide various other features including flexible payment modes, a simplified purchasing process, flexible promotions, and precise, fast-user data mining. The growing number of WCDMA users, the rich terminal types, and the customised software platform will make it easier for China Unicom to achieve success with WoStore.

China Unicom Ltd. (NYSE: CHU)