China Telecom, one of China's top three mobile carriers, said on June 26 it has approached Research in Motion about possibly offering its popular BlackBerry mobile email service in China. "The two companies have just started preliminary contacts," China Telecom's spokesman said, without providing more details.
China's other major mobile carrier, Unicom, has also said in the past that it was in talks with RIM about offering BlackBerry service. But a spokeswoman had no update on whether those talks were still ongoing. "We view a potential tie-up of China Telecom and BlackBerry as a positive but not a game changer," Goldman Sachs analyst Helen Zhu wrote in a research note.
She noted that China Mobile already offers BlackBerry service in China, and that the product has limited appeal to a broader mass audience. China's three main telecoms carriers have been seeking to beef up their offerings and differentiate themselves following a long-awaited restructuring of the industry and issuance of third-generation (3G) mobile licenses over the last year.
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