‍Telecoms giant China Mobile launched services in the UK on Wednesday, marking its first foray overseas as it looks to target a growing number of Chinese tourists and expats visiting and living in the country. 

With hundreds of millions of users in China and revenue topping 100 billion US dollars this year, what are the ambitions of China Mobile and the wider Chinese telecoms industry?

China Mobile, the world’s largest telecoms operator in terms of users, is working with BT in the UK, where it launched a SIM card on Wednesday as part of a service called CMLink. The move overseas is initially aimed at Chinese tourists, professionals and expats who live or frequently travel to the UK.

Talking to China Daily, China Mobile chairman Li Feng said, “the launch of CMLink in the UK is an important milestone in our internationalization strategy.” CMLink is a pay-as-you-go service, where users will be able to make calls free of charge to other CMLink users, as well as China Mobile users based in China. In the future, China Mobile users will be able to buy CMLink SIMs and link them together in dual SIM phones.

For the 82,000 Chinese students currently based in the UK, 115,000 annual visitors or British Chinese community of 433,000 people, the ability to make calls free of charge back to China suggests CMLink has a lot of potential.

However, similar services launched in recent years by China Telecom, which allowed users access to local Chinese or UK call rates depending on their location, struggled to attract much attention, with only 20,000 SIMs sold in London in four years.

China Mobile will be hoping that offering free calls to its 880 million China-based users will be a more impressive selling point. The SIM package offers 4G data at a competitive rate, with China Mobile able to “pass…cost-cutting benefits” to its customers, thanks to the size of its domestic network, according to Li.

The Chinese provider made 708.4 billion yuan (102.8 billion US dollars) in revenue last year, 623.4 billion yuan of which came from services provided to customers. The bulk of its telecoms revenue came from data, which accounted for 46.2 percent of income from mobile services, ahead of money made from calls, multimedia messages and text messages.

The UK launch of CMLink is not the first move overseas for China Mobile. Zong Pakistan was launched by the Chinese giant in 2008, and is the country’s third-largest mobile service provider with 26 million subscribers and the biggest 4G coverage area.

China Unicom earlier this year said that it had become the first mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) to launch data sharing services in 47 countries and regions, after launching its CUniq service in the US in March. 

Several months earlier, CUniq went online in Europe in December 2016, allowing users to access 4G networks around the world with multiple numbers on one card.

While CUniq is aimed especially at business travelers, and China Mobile’s CMLink firmly has Chinese students, expats and professionals in mind, the size of China’s telecoms industry and the financial resources backing it means it is in a strong position to further expand overseas, and eventually offer its services to more people outside of China.