On March 26th, GSMA held the Post-MWC event in Beijing, inviting high-level leaders and international partners from China’s digital ecosystem to conduct in-depth discussions on the main growth trends, industry challenges, key opportunities for global cooperation, and innovation and development opportunities faced by multinational enterprises in China.

GSMA released the annual report China’s Mobile Economy Development 2023, which presents the latest milestones in the development of China’s mobile industry. Highlights of the report include that China is expected to be the first market to reach 1 billion 5G connections by 2025. By 2030, China will have 1.6 billion 5G connections, accounting for nearly a third of the global total. 5G will overtake 4G as the dominant mobile technology in China by 2024. The utilization rate of 5G will continue to improve as wider network deployment and the emergence of more cost-effective terminals. In 2022, mobile technologies and services contributed 5.5% of China’s GDP - the equivalent of 1.1 trillion US dollars in economic value added. By the end of 2022, the number of 5G base stations in China exceeded 2.3 million.

At the Post-MWC event, guests discussed key topics and challenges emerging from MWC Barcelona, such as the GSMA Open Gateway global initiative, a groundbreaking initiative that aims to promote collaborative development in the mobile industry through open APIs and provide greater value to developers, operators, and users. The GSMA Open Gateway will help developers and cloud service providers improve service quality and deploy services more quickly in operator networks through a unified interface. The initiative has released 8 universal network APIs and plans to continue releasing more in 2023.