Three analysts predicted losses of 48 million, 93 million and 500 million yuan, respectively - assuming a 1.19 billion yuan exceptional loss that state-backed Unicom has said it will take this year. Other analysts foresee profits ranging from 200 million to 470 million yuan, including the writedown. Analysts don't expect to see as steep a drop in average revenue per user (ARPU) as that reported last week by arch-rival China Mobile (Hong Kong) Ltd, mainly because Unicom's monthly ARPU, a key measure, is much lower than China Mobile's. "There's no track record for us to forecast. We are pretty comfortable with wireless and paging," said Nomura Securities analyst Kelvin Ho. "I would say the swing factor would be from the data (and) fixed telephony businesses," he said.

ING Barings analyst Craig Racine said that he expects a net profit of 470 million yuan, assuming China Unicom books half the exceptional loss in the first half and half in the second.

China Unicom raised $5.65 billion in a June public offering that was Asia's largest-ever outside Japan. But the company still ranks a distant number-two to former near-monopoly China Mobile both in market share and in the hearts of investors. Jardine Fleming, part of the syndicate that took Unicom public, has a 'sell' rating on the stock based on Unicom's lower-revenue customers and the huge expenditures it faces to build out its network.

Still, China's wireless market is exploding, with an expected 73 million customers by the end of this year from 43 million at the end of 1999, and Unicom is cutting into China Mobile's market share, which slipped to 83 per cent in its service territory at the end of June, from 93 per cent a year earlier.