Foreign Companies in Chinese Market

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While foreign companies like Nokia，Motorola and Ericsson previously dominated the market in mobile phones，now more than 40%of the handset market belongs to local companies like Ningbo Bird，Nanjing Panda Electronics，Haier and TCL Mobile.

And China is poised to push foreign competitors out of other sectors of the industry as wel1.With the govermment estimating the country will become the world’s largest market for semiconductors by 2006 local companies are rushing to develop astrong domestic chip industry while at least a dozen Chinese internet portals have challenged the Chinese versions of Yahoo or Google.

Foreign companies investing in telecommunications，as in most industries，report problems with intellectual property violations and during the WTO accession transition there have been a number of complaints that telecommunications has been a particularly slow industry to meet its obligations.

This probably reflects the close attention the government has paid to what it considers a strategic sector and serves as a warning that even if Chinese companies were not as competitive as they are，it is unlikely the government would allow the market to be dominated by foreign players.

But considering the size of the market and the speed at which it is growing，the Motorolas，Nokias and Ericssons of the world have little choice but to continue to invest in China.