Beijing, March 12. (PTI): A Chinese student has proven to be a dream customer for cellphone manufacturers, as he has changed his mobile phone 500 times in nine years.

Twenty four-year-old Zhang Yi, a student in Nanjing University is not attached by any particular brand and is constantly on the lookout for new functions in his mobile.

"I still haven't been able to find one that really suits me," he said.

The journalism and communication student kept one cell phone for almost six months, but ditched another one after just 12 hours.

His first mobile was a present from his father in 1998, when cell phones were a rare possession. It cost more than 8,000 yuan (around $1,025) and was expensive to use.

"The phone had limited functions. To me it was only a pager and I got rid of it in less than two months," Zhang said.

In 1999, as simplified Chinese displays and text messaging became available, Zhang upgraded again. But his new mobile didn't have any real choice of background colours and ring tones, so he swapped it for another.

From 1998 to 2002, he owned 14 mobiles.

"I buy a phone I like on impulse, and then sell it again later on. At a rough guess, I must have lost several thousand yuan upgrading all the time," he was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency.

Latest statistics from the Ministry of Information Industry indicate that China will have 520 million mobile phone users in 2007.

Almost 70 million people in 2006 have bought a second mobile phone, the figure greater than the number of people who bought their first cellphone in 2005.

China had 467 million cell phone users by the end of January, indicating that one out of three Chinese owned a mobile, latest official statistics revealed.

As mobile fees decreased and the rural market for cell phones continued to open up, the number of cell phone users expanded rapidly. In January alone, the figure surged by 6.33 million, figures from MII showed.

According to the MII, the number of telephone users has topped 830 million, with that of fixed-line telephone users reaching 368 million.

China imported its first mobile phone telecommunication facilities in 1987 and it took a decade for the number of subscribers to reach 10 million.

Four years later, the country had the largest number of mobile phone subscribers in the world.

China has also emerged as one of the largest producers of home-made models of mobile phones. It is also the leading manufacturing base for mobile phones of multinational companies.

With China's fixed-line telecom operators expected to get 3G licenses soon, a survey shows that 57 per cent of cell phone users firmly intend to buy third generation (3G) mobile phones in 2007 and another 37 per cent say they may purchase 3G cell phones.

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