e gravitational effect of large emerging markets that absorb R and D bandwidth that would previously have been available elsewhere. Ten years ago Jim O Neill, a partner at Goldman Sachs, wrote a paper entitled Building Better Global Economics and coined the term BRIC identifying the four countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China that combined large internal markets with high growth potential. Introduction Over subsequent years these countries have not only been tracked as an entity by analysts but have also developed political and economic links that aim to leverage their combined economic power. In 2010 China invited South Africa to become a member SO the acronym is now officially BRICS. The BRICS are benchmarked in terms of geography and demography and economic growth rate. All are markets in which large telecommunication investments are presently being made, but of the four China stands out as having the largest number of internet users and the largest number of mobile phones that combined together suggest that China is already by far the world's largest single potential market for mobile broadband access. In terms of mobile connections China and India together are now five times the size of the US market. China's present dominance is illustrated in Figure 1.1. Figure 1.2 shows China Mobile's particular leverage. In turn, this has had a dramatic effect on the local vendor community. Over a five-year period between 2006 and 2011, Huawei has moved from being a subscale (in relative terms) infrastructure provider with an $8.5 billion turnover to being number two globally with $28 billion dollars of revenue and 110 000 employees across 150 nationalities. 8 A similar pull- through effect has created a local development and manufacturing community both in China and Taiwan that has challenged and will continue to challenge Nokia both at the lower, mid and upper end of the user equipment market. HTC in Taiwan, for example, at the time of China India United States Russia Brazil Indonesia Japan Vietnam Germany Pakistan