Sehat Sutardja
Analyst · Craig Ellis with Caris & Company
Let me add a little bit more color about why is TD so important to China. There's a lot of people -- a lot of people in outside China are skeptical about the opportunities of TD in China. The way I look at it, I can explain it from a technical point of view. But then, I can speak until I'm tired, and nobody will care anyway. So I'm trying to, this time, answer you from a different angle, from a non-technical point of view. As you know, Chinese have been run -- the society has been run for 4,000 or 5,000 years of history. And over those history, they invented many new technologies hundreds of years before anybody else invented those technologies. Yes, okay, recently, okay, in the modern eras, in the cell phone, they were behind. But they were behind only for a few years. The TD-SCDMA industry standard was developed a few years later than the WCDMA 3G standards. So it's natural for the WCDMAs to be ramping up in the rest of the world first. However, China, with understanding the Chinese, already waited 5,000 years in history. Waiting for a few more years for ramping up all the majority of their cell phones to use Chinese phone standard. Okay, it's of the highest priority for the Chinese people. So this, compared to anything else, this is more important than, let's say, speeding up the deployment of 3G into China by using outside technology. And they're only few years. And from then on the Chinese people will be labeled do not have any 3G technology. So the way I look at it, okay, that's not going to happen. What's going to happen is that TD is beginning to be deployed in China for the Chinese people. They're ramping up huge number of subscriber, and as I mentioned earlier, 600 million subscribers. Over time, those subscribers will all move to TD-SCDMA and TD LTE. The base stations already been deployed. More than 220,000 base station last year being deployed throughout the whole China, not just in the big cities. Everywhere, throughout the whole China. That's more than base stations, the number of base stations in the largest area in, let's say, in the U.S. in total. And this is just the new base station for China Mobile, and they continue to invest in new base stations this year and next year. So you can see that the opportunities for us is great. The only thing, as Clyde said, is we need to just wait and see when the rest of the customer will ramp up. As the products get more mature, as the prices goes down, it will be natural for those design wins to continue to go into production. And the beauty is that we have 80% of design wins. So at least we don't have to worry about, okay, when it actually ramps, it will be somebody else, not only us.