China’s overall new mobile subscribers retreated from the previous month’s high of 8.6 million to 7.6 mil wireless sign-ups in July.

The world’s largest mobile operator – China Mobile gained 7.1 million new subscribers for July and its subscriber base totaled 421.7 mil users, up 24.8% y-o-y. The company’s new users dropped slightly from the 7.55 mil additions in June but China Mobile still retains a 71.1% chunk of market share.

China Unicom, the country’s second largest wireless carrier, ended July with an overall 171.3 million subscribers. The company added 952,000 new GSM users for the month and total GSM subscribers hit 128.55 million by July 31 versus 127.6 million as of end-Jun. Its CDMA mobile user base declined by 413,000 subscribers to 42.8 mil.

As part of Beijing’s telecom sector restructuring plan to merge the 6 existing state-owned operators into three, offering both wireless and fixed-line services, Unicom will be merging with fixed-line operator China Netcom.

The merged entity is expected to have 259 million subscribers, including 128 mil GSM users, 109 mil local-access users, 23.36 million broadband users and own 18,000 self-run sales outlets; out of which 5,000 will belong to China Unicom and 13,000 for China Netcom.

China Netcom added 625,000 broadband users to reach nearly 24 million total subscribers for the month of July and its fixed-line users fell by 300,000 to 108.2 million total lines.

Unicom also announced its CDMA networks will be delivered to China Telecom. The former aims to invest up to 100 billion yuan (US$15 bn) in the next two years to upgrade its GSM network and focus on 3G services development.

For the month of July, China Telecom posted a decline of 600,000 users to 214.29 million fixed-line subscribers. The company added 810,000 broadband subscribers to reach 40.76 million total users.