Tianjin is dubbed the “city of mobile phones” in China. Its industrial scale will be further enhanced within the next two years as the Municipality reaches a 200-million-unit annual production capacity, making it China’s largest mobile phone manufacturing base.

Tianjin is among the first batch of national-level IT base cities in China. The electronic information industry is the city’s fundamental pillar industry. Its industrial output value takes up 23 percent of that of the whole city, and the fifth largest one in all of China.

Since Motorola established the first mobile phone factory in the Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area (TEDA) in 1992, Tianjin has attracted many domestic and overseas enterprises to set up their factories, such as Samsung, Kyocera, Jabil, and ZTE Corporation. A manufacturing base centering around the Motorola, Samsung and Sanyo brand products, with an annual production capacity of 150 million units per year, has been formed to further accelerate the growth of an industrial chain in Tianjin and surrounding regions.

Tianjin has improved its environment for industries related to mobile phones, around which an extensive, comprehensive industrial cluster has emerged. There are almost 200 supporting production enterprises in Tianjin, which comes into five manufacturing bases: a base for chip resistors, represented by Samsung Electro-Mechanics, Panasonic, and Rohm; a center for integrated circuit, represented by Freescale, and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (“SMIC”); a battery-manufacturing center headed by Tianjin Lishen Battery Joint-Stock Co., Ltd., Samsung SDI, J Power, and Tianjin Lantian Sanyo Battery Co., Ltd.; a center for electronic elements represented by CTS (Tianjin) Electronics Company, Ltd., and GE; a base for injection moldings represented by Nypro and Rixin Plastic Manufacturing, as well as enterprises such as Samsung SDI Mobile Display Co., Ltd., Alps Electric, Zhonghuan Hi-tech and Sambu Electronics that manufacture monitors, keyboards, speakers, chargers, microphones, cables, sockets, antennas, earphones and the like.

Tianjin established an international communication platform for the mobile phone industry, and has successfully organized six International Mobile Phone Industry Exhibition and Forums (IMIE), the largest event in this industry with the most international participants in China. It has become the most attractive trade platform for the mobile phone industry and has created rich opportunities for the domestic mobile phone enterprises and companies in the related sectors.

With the sound investment environment and the growing impact of clusters, Tianjin has attracted an increasing number of new enterprises to invest, which in turn drives the industry’s further growth.

Jabil increased investment to its factories in Tianjin. It further added facilities such as LCD monitors to the existing molds and injection-molded parts. Jabil undertakes the apparatus assembling and is setting up four OEM production lines mainly for Nokia. Once they are completed, the products of all top three mobile phone manufacturers in the world will be manufacturing from Tianjin.

Following the operation of ZTE Corporation’s 3G mobile phone R&D center and the projects of Jabil Green Point (JGP) and Leimone Group in the next two years, Tianjin’s annual mobile phone manufacturing capacity will reach 200 million units. Tianjin’s telecommunications products will maintain a leading position in 3G and other similar high-end products and become the country’s best, largest and most complete manufacturing center for telecommunications products.

According to the statistics from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China produced 560 million mobile phone units in 2008. That accounted for 47.5 percent of the global output. Tianjin, meanwhile, produced 90.0482 million units, or 16.1 percent of China’s total for the year.