The mobile phone industry, domestic and foreign, has expected to get a reprieve from the current industrial gloom, since commercial use of the 3G (third-generation mobile telecom) technology extends up in China.

Global mobile phone production was down 15.8 percent at 244.8 million units in the first quarter in 2009 compared to the same period in last year, the biggest slide in 20 years according to IDC report. While China’s mobile phone production was down 3 percent in the first quarter in 2009, according to figures from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

However China’s mobile phone industry has shown signs of recovery for the increasing demand for 3G phones, some attendees agreed. China has the world’s biggest number, 600 million, of cell phone users by the end of July last year. CDMA which most widely applied for cell phones can transmit multiple digital signals simultaneously over the same carrier frequency. China’s three telecom companies use different CDMA standards. China Unicom uses the Europe-developed WCDMA, China Telecom uses the US.-developed CDMA2000, while China Mobile uses the home-developed TD-SCDMA.

Aggregate number of CDMA users of China Telecom and China Unicom reached 32.84 million, up 634.2 percent by the end of March. In the first quarter, new CDMA mobile customers of the two companies increased by 4.93 million, which is believed to have given confidence to cell phone makers. But the number will reach 900 million in the next three years by the report of the China Internet Network Information Center. Therefore, more people would use their mobile phones for Internet access rather than the PCs. A greater demand for the 3G-based mobiles phones would emerge.