s has advantages and dis- advantages. If you don't happen to have GSM deployed in your network it is definitely a disadvantage as you will be exposed to an alternative technology that is subscale. A design and manufacturing team will typically get a better return from servicing a large established mainstream market and certainly would be wary of the opportunity cost implicit in diverting resources away from what should be a dominant income stream. But also there is a question as to how fast newer technologies are adopted. The adoption rate is driven by the scale difference in user experience between the old and new technology and the relative cost of delivery. To date neither the scale difference between 3 G and 2 G systems or the relative delivery economics or the user experience difference have been sufficient to drive a radically fast transition. As Figure 4.8 shows even taking WCDMA and CDMA together they still only represent 25% of the market ten years after market introduction. We also need to take into account relative shifts in terms of regional importance and how these might affect future value ownership in the industry. In our introduction we highlighted the rapid rise of China and Asia Pacific in general as the globally dominant market for Telecommunications Economies of Scale 73.96% 13.57% 11.50% 0.28% 0.49% 0.04% 0.16% W-CDMA TD-SCDMA WiMAX AMPS/TDMA Figure 4.8 Mobile connections by technology Q1 2011. Reproduced with permission of The Mobile World. telecommunication products and increasingly as a manufacturing and development centre of telecommunication products, both for its internal market and rest of the world markets. Figure 4.9 tracks this trend over the five years from 2005 to Q1 2011 and shows the relative decline of the US as a market measured in terms of mobile connections - a remarkable change considering that 15 years earlier the US represented 70% of the global market by volume and value. Figure 4.10 shows the relative market presence of the top twenty operators with China Mobile as the 