Research On The Performance Of China Telecom Industry Reform

People have gradually become aware of the power of the information technology since the 1980s. In the information age, people communicate more often, exchange bigger quantity of information and require more qualified tools of communication than ever before. The telecommunication service plays a more important role in the social life. The telecom industry is one of the world’s fastest growing sectors, and its development has a huge impact on the revolutionary changes in the technological base of the entire national economy. As an emerging developing country, China maintains a steady and rapid development of the overall economy, and the telecom industry has obtained remarkable achievements.A series of reform measures has caused great changes in China’s telecom industry, such as the rapid expansion of industrial scale, the rapid increase of level of technology and service. In the past few years, with the development of the mobile Internet, the Internet has become the new power of the economy growth. That many industries are promoted by combining with the Internet is a major character of the new economy. Telecom industry is also speeding up the combination with other industries, in order to make the collaborative innovation. At the same time, the different perceptions for the effect of the reform of the telecom industry lead to an exploration of the path of the reform and the future of China’s telecom industry. This paper attempts to, on the basis of the government regulation theory, analyze the reform path and discussing the direction of China’s telecom industry by applying methods of empirical analysis.This paper firstly qualitatively analyses the performance of China’s telecom industry during the four stages of the reform. The reform measures are breaking the monopoly and introducing competition, splitting vertically and competing in sub-industry, splitting transverse and promoting competition, and promoting overall business competition. Secondly, with reference to the methods of performance evaluation developed in the theory of industrial competitiveness, this paper builds an evaluation system of China’s telecom industry performance from the three aspects, which are the overall development of the telecom industry, the economic efficiency of the telecom industry and the quality of telecom services. Finally, this paper calculates out the performance index and evaluates the efficiency of the telecom industry in the thirty-one provinces of China in the period of 2003 to 2014, using the factor analysis method and data envelop analysis method.The theoretical and empirical analysis comes to the following conclusions. (1) The effect of China’s telecom industry reform is significant, and the performance index has grown gradually over the years. In terms of market structure, the telecom market is becoming more and more competitive; and in terms of industry development, the quantity of telecom service is largened rapidly, and quality of the service is improved significantly; (2) From 2012, with the coming of the digital age, data traffic has become the area with the most significant growth, and the income from the traditional landline and mobile voice and text business continues declining. The performance index in this period of time was relatively stable. (3) The Malmquist’s total factors productivity of China’s telecom industry is improved, and the average annual growth rate is 7.5%, which is mainly powered by technology improvement rather than technology effectiveness improvement. The scales of telecom industry in most of the provinces (municipalities) gradually reach the optimal level, and the payoff begins to decrease with the scales continuing to expand. So in order to achieve the technical efficiency improvements, China’s telecom industry needs to rely more on pure technical efficiency improvement.Industrial reform promotes the development of China’s telecom industry greatly. And the path of reform is consistent with the technical characteristics of the telecom industry and the development of China’s economy. However, with the new trend of digitalization and networked nature, China’s telecom industry is facing new potentials and has to deal with new emerging problems. Therefore, it’s required to explore the routine of a new round of telecom industrial reform theoretically and practically.