China Mobile, the country's largest mobile service provider, launched a UK SIM card on Wednesday, in competition with its two closest rivals to provide cheap calling and roaming to Chinese customers visiting Britain.
The new service, called CMLink, targets the burgeoning number of Chinese tourists and students in the UK, and people in the UK looking to connect with family and friends in China.
"The launch of CMLink in the UK is an important milestone in our internationalization strategy," said Li Feng, chairman and CEO of China Mobile International. "We've chosen the UK to launch our first overseas mobile service because the UK's telecom industry is mature and has high standards, and that the UK is an important destination for Chinese travelers to visit."
Founded in 1997 as a State-owned enterprise, the company focused on providing mobile services to China's population and grew to become the nation's largest provider of mobile services, in terms of number of subscribers.
CMLink will run on BT's EE Network. Its pay-as-you-go service allows users free calls to other CMLink users in the UK and to China Mobile users in China. CMLink also offers different monthly packages with competitive international rates.
Its launch follows similar initiatives by China Telecom and China Unicom, who are China Mobile's two biggest rivals back home.
In 2012, China Telecom managed to steal a march on its rivals by launching a one-SIM-multiple-number service, so users could be charged local call rates regardless of whether they were calling a number in the UK or one in China.
As of the end of 2016, China Telecom had sold about 20,000 SIMS in London and 20,000 in Paris. In December 2016, China Unicom launched a dual number SIM, based on the same idea.
Despite being a newcomer, China Mobile believes there is still a lot of opportunity in the market. Currently, the UK is home to 433,000 British Chinese and more than 82,000 Chinese students and it has attracted a further 115,000 visits from Chinese people in the first half of 2017, an increase of 47 percent on the previous year.
Li said what makes China Mobile's SIM different is its free calls to China Mobile's large customer base of 880 million domestic mobile subscribers, which is a significant portion of China's domestic total of 1.39 billion mobile subscribers.
"Our large network in China helps us to operate more efficiently," said Li. "We are then able to pass those cost-cutting benefits to our customers."
Francisco Jeronimo, research director for European mobile devices at the market intelligence company IDC, said CMLink's launch is timely because the UK provides a market for such services. He said the China Unicom and China Telecom services did not do as well as expected because they were not well promoted. He pointed out that China Mobile's service could have a similar fate if it is not marketed adequately.
"It will be interesting to see how much China Mobile is willing to invest into adverting CMLink," he said. "In addition, they should think more about advertising the service to non-Chinese users who need to keep connected with Chinese contacts, and, in the UK, this is clearly a growing customer group."
