When Beijing issued in May last year its 12th Five Year Plan for the telecommunications sector, one of its lofty goals was to plough investments of more than USD323 billion into basic network infrastructure by 2015. A major part of that plan is the commercial roll-out of advanced, high-speed 4G mobile infrastructure, built on the China-developed standard called time-division long-term evolution (TD-LTE), by all three state-owned telecommunications network operators. Technology research firm IHS forecast China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom to deploy a total of 1.05 million 4G base transceiver stations from this year to 2015, a massive undertaking that will increase the operators’ lucrative data traffic in the world’s biggest smartphone market. “The effort is important because mobile revenue accounts for an increasingly larger share of each carrier’s overall revenue,” IHS Analyst Zhao Hailin said in a report. “And revenue could grow even more if more next-generation wireless infrastructure were in place.” The expansion in 4G mobile services will likely help the industry achieve another big target set by the 12th Five Year Plan: more than USD241.9 billion in revenue by 2015. The three operators had combined revenue of USD172.9 billion last year. Of  China’s 1.2 billion total mobile subscribers at the end of August, about 360 million were 3G users “ripe for upgrading to 4G if the infrastructure were available”, Zhao said. China Mobile is making the biggest push this year with a plan to deploy 207,000 4G base stations in both urban and rural areas. China Telecom will install 70,000 base stations and China Unicom 30,000. IHS forecast China Mobile to run the largest 4G mobile infrastructure in China with 477,000 base stations by 2015, which would cement the company’s position as the biggest 4G network operator worldwide. It had 750.42 million subscribers at the end of August. IHS estimated that China Telecom, which had 178.64 million subscribers in August, will have 320,000 4G base stations by 2015, while China Unicom, which counted 269.47 million subscribers in August, will have 250,000 stations. For both China Telecom and China Unicom, FDD-LTE will serve as the primary standard of their 4G networks, with TD-LTE adding supplementary capacity, the South China Morning Post reports.

China will allow satellite television stations to buy the rights to broadcast only one foreign program each year from next year as part of new restrictions to push “morality-building” and educational shows. The campaign could push domestic viewers away from broadcast television toward pre-recorded shows downloaded from the internet to computers and mobile devices. The English-language Shanghai Daily said the new restrictions were intended to crack down on the growing practice of buying the copyright of proven foreign shows like Britain’s Got Talent, and then localizing them without further modification.

IMAX is partnering with Chinese TV maker TCL to design and manufacture a high-end home theater system aimed at China’s growing ranks of affluent movie fans. The joint venture is expected to launch the new system in China and other unnamed markets starting in 2015. The home theaters will feature “Imax-enhanced” films delivered straight to homes through a secure system. Imax said it would cost less than the company’s existing Private Theater system, which retails for USD2 million. Imax Corp and TCL Multimedia Technology Holdings have an equal share in the venture. Shenzhen-based TCL is one of the world’s biggest television makers. “As content viewing in the home is constantly improving, we wanted to stake out an entirely new position in the premium home theater market,” TCL’s Chairman Li Dongsheng said in a statement. In July, Imax teamed up with Chinese partner Wanda Group to open 120 giant-screen cinemas in China.

Perfect World, a leading developer and operator of online games in China, is expected to benefit from the plan to lift a 13-year ban on foreign video game console sales via the newly launched Shanghai Free Trade Zone (FTZ). The Beijing-based company signed a strategic cooperation agreement last month to pre-install its “massively multiplayer online” (MMO) games in a new line of internet-linked set-top boxes from Chengdu Geeya Technology, a domestic manufacturer of digital television equipment. “As a result, game players would be able to play Perfect World’s MMOs from television screens and enjoy a console game-like experience on current MMOs,” Barclays said in a research note. Nasdaq-listed Perfect World and Geeya, which is listed on the Growth Enterprise Market (GEM) board of the Shenzhen stock exchange, will jointly market the products. Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo’s Wii game consoles have already been available to consumers in China through the grey market, where – according to Niko Partners – about one million game consoles are sold each year. Microsoft and BesTV New Media announced a deal to invest up to USD237 million in a joint venture in the Shanghai FTZ. It is expected to develop new games and services for Microsoft’s Xbox games to be played on the internet protocol television network of BesTV, which has about 18 million subscribers. China’s video gaming market grew 36.4% year-on-year to reach CNY33.9 billion in the first half this year.

Taiwan’s HTC slid into the red for the first time in the third quarter, with sales hit hard by fierce competition in the smartphone market, supply-chain constraints and internal turmoil. It posted an operating loss of NTD3.5 billion as sales for the quarter tumbled by a third from a year earlier. Microsoft was talking to HTC about adding its Windows operating system to the Taiwanese firm’s Android-based smartphones at little or no cost. HTC is the first company to make both Windows and Android phones. HTC says the next two months will be its “biggest challenge” as it tries to win sales from Apple and Samsung. HTC’s share of the global smartphone market shrank to 2.8% in the second quarter from 5.8% a year earlier. “We don’t see a turnaround in the near future,” said Richard Ko, Analyst at KGI Securities. “Its products aren’t good enough to compete, and those in the pipeline aren’t going to rescue the business either.” HTC is pinning its hopes on new products, including models that build on the HTC One franchise, to halt declining sales. The company’s HTC One mini, which went on sale in August, features a 4.3-inch display and a more slender design. The slump in its share price could make HTC a takeover target for rivals including Lenovo and Huawei Technologies. Sources said HTC had combined production from two lines at Taoyuan in Taiwan into one, which would reduce its potential capacity by about one million phones per month, out of a total capacity of around 2.5 million at the site and around 4.5 million including operations elsewhere. Most of the assembly lines in HTC’s Shanghai factory, which can produce two million phones a month, were also out of production, one of the sources said, with only a small number of phones being produced for sale inside China. HTC was considering selling the out-of-use production lines in China and Taiwan, two of the sources said. HTC Chief Executive Peter Chou, the driving force behind its award-winning handsets, has temporarily handed some of his duties to the company’s Chairwoman in order to focus on innovation and product development, the Financial Times reported. HTC, which positions itself as a premium brand, will contract out some manufacturing to FIH Mobile, a subsidiary of Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry, because contract manufacturers have better component supply management and cost control. It is also in talks with Compal Communications and Wistron, according to four sources.