Even as Canada’s Rogers Communications and Germany’s T-Mobile compete to offer the worst voice and data plans for the iPhone 3G, Hutchison Global Communications on Monday unveiled what may be the best.

Hutchison (HTX), which stuck a deal with Apple (AAPL) in May to bring the iPhone to Hong Kong and Macau, will be offering customers a choice of two pricing plans:

• 8GB iPhone for HK$2,938 ($377) plus HK$188 per month ($24/month) for 500MB voice and data
• 8GB iPhone for free plus HK$498 per month ($64/month) for 2,200 minutes airtime and unlimited data.

“We believe the (minimum price) plan is comfortable enough for average data users,” a Hutchison spokesperson told the Dow Jones Newswire, adding that 500 megabytes will allow users to send 250,000 emails or browse Apple’s Web site 2,000 times. (link)

Bottom line in U.S. dollars: Including the cost of the phone, Hong Kong residents will pay between $955 and $1,532 over the life of a 24 month contract.

Some comparisons (all expressed in U.S. dollars for the equivalent of a 2-year contract):

• Hutchison in Hong Kong: $955 (500MB voice and data) to $1,532 (2,200 min., unlimited data)
• O2 (TEF) in the U.K.: $1,698 (75 minutes, unlimited data) to $3,588 (3000 min., unlimited data)
• AT&T (T) in the U.S.: $1,879 (450 min., unlimited data) to $3,318 (unlimited voice and data)
• T-Mobile (DT) in Germany: $1,366 (500MB data) to $3,374 (5GB data)
• Rogers (RCI) in Canada: $1,624 (150 min., 400 MB data) to $2,932 (800 min., 2GB data)

The overseas iPhone deal that could prove to be Apple’s most important has cleared its final hurdle, according to two reports out of China.

“Apple is no longer insisting on a revenue-sharing policy,” China Mobile spokeswoman Rainie Lei told Reuters on Friday, “so the biggest hurdle for China Mobile to bring in the iPhone has been cleared.”

“We’ve broken through the biggest obstacle,” Gao Songge, deputy director of China Mobile’s general department, told Agence-France Presse. “And we are negotiating at the working level.”

China Mobile is the world’s largest mobile phone carrier, with more than 380 million customers. Talks with Apple had reportedly broken off over Cupertino’s insistence on getting a share of the carrier’s monthly revenue, something China Mobile said it would never agree to.

Although Apple (AAPL) has since dropped that demand in many of the overseas contracts signed this year, most observers assumed that the China deal wouldn’t materialize before 2009.

But Steve Jobs told CNBC two weeks ago that he expected deals with both China and Russia — the other big hold-out — to come a lot sooner than that.

“We just didn’t have a chance to get close with Russia and China,” Jobs told the network. “And I think you’ll see them happen later this year.” (link)

In a separate news item, MarketWatch reported Friday that China Mobile will be providing 3G cellular service at the Beijing Olympics using its own Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access, or TD-SCDMA, standard. Visitors to Beijing using WCDMA-based devices will get much slower connection speeds as service automatically drops to 2.5G. (link)

There were plenty of losers Monday in the wake of the People’s Republic of China’s sweeping overhaul of its telecommunications industry.

China Mobile lost more than $25 billion in market value after the government announced over the weekend that it was merging two smaller competitors in an effort to weaken the giant carrier’s hold on the country’s cell phone business — prompting Goldman Sachs to issue a rare “sell” rating on China Mobile’s (CHL) shares.

Markets sank across the Pacific Rim on the news. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 2.4%. The Shanghai Composite Index dropped 3.1%. Japan’s Nikkei slumped 2.3% to its lowest level in a month

But there may be several winners: including Steve Jobs’ Apple.

Since last fall, Jobs has been trying — without success — to negotiate an iPhone deal with China Mobile. The country’s 583 million subscribers represent the biggest prize on the planet for cell phone makers — the last missing piece in Jobs’ plan to blanket the earth with iPhones — and China Mobile controls two thirds of them.

But since the companies last talked, two things have changed. In its recent flurry of deals with other foreign carriers, Apple seems to have backed away from its insistence on hefty revenue-sharing formulas in exchange for exclusivity — the sticking point in its early negotiations with China Mobile.

And now China Mobile’s hand has been weakened by its own government.

A Chinese statement issued Monday said that the mergers would set in motion the awarding of licenses for 3G service that supports wireless video, Web surfing and other services, according to an AP report.

That report added that the restructuring would create opportunities for foreign equipment vendors such as Ericsson (ERIC), Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), Nokia (NOK) and Siemens (SI).

We’re adding Apple (AAPL) to that list.

With less than three weeks to go before Steve Jobs’ June 9 keynote address, Apple may be close to a deal that would add two of Asia’s hottest cellphone carriers to its growing list of international partners.

The Telecoms Korea news service reported late last week that Apple (AAPL) is planning a special joint release of the next-generation iPhone with two carriers whose names are synonymous with 3G: Japan’s NTT DoCoMo and Korea Telecom Freetel. (link, paid subscription).

NTT DoCoMo (DCM), with more than 50 million subscribers, is Japan’s predominant mobile phone carrier. It pioneered so-called third-generation cell phone technology with the 2001 launch of FOMA (Freedom of Mobile Multimedia Access), the world’s first W-CDMA 3G service.

KTF, in which NTT owns a minority stake, adopted DoCoMo’s 3G technology in 2004. It has 12 million subscribers in South Korea and operations in several other Asian countries, including India, Indonesia and China.

For a U.S. firm to bring advanced mobile technology to Japan and Korea has a coals-to-Newcastle feel. These are two of the most cell-phone savvy countries in the world, where features like multimedia messaging and “wave to pay” services are standard fare.

If Apple can conclude the deal before June 9, that would leave China as the last big Asian market without an authorized iPhone carrier.

Source: AppleInsider.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster took a lot of heat back in June 2007 when he predicted, three weeks before Apple even began selling the iPhone, that the company would be shipping them at the rate of 45 million a year by 2009.

But Munster is sticking to his guns, and on Monday released a detailed report to clients in which he lays out the steps by which he expects Apple (AAPL) to hit his target — quadrupling 2008 sales.

• By introducing a 3G iPhone within the next 3 to 6 months
• By offering a family of 2 to 3 iPhones — including lower-priced models selling for $200 to $300 — by Jan 2009 at the latest
• By entering new countries, effectively doubling the addressable market every year for the next two years.
• By adding new features, such as games (Tiger Woods Golf, played by swinging the iPhone?) and remote purchases (Starbucks lattes without the wait?) starting in June.

Conceding that most investors consider his 45 million estimate “outrageously aggressive,” Munster supports it with a somewhat mysterious chart that compares the 409% year-to-year growth rate of the iPod in its breakout years with his estimate of just over 300% for the iPhone.

What’s mysterious about this chart is that it shows sales of 35.6 million iPhones in fiscal 2009, not the 45 million Munster is projecting. The discrepancy may be due to the difference between Apple’s fiscal year and our calender year, but Munster does not explain it.

Slightly clearer is the roadmap Munster offers for Apple’s overseas expansion. He points out that iPhone has achieved roughly 3% penetration of the 153 million subscriber base in the six countries in which it is currently sold. The following chart shows how he expects Apple to double that addressable market over the next two years. Note that Japan is the only Asian country he’s counting on for 2008. China, he says, is not likely to sign on until Apple drops its insistence on revenue sharing, something he expects the company to do in 2009.

Not much news was committed by Apple (AAPL) at its annual shareholders’ meeting Tuesday in Cupertino — although the shareholders did manage to make headlines by passing a referendum (which the company opposed) that gives them a nonbinding say on executive compensation. “I’m hoping that the ’say on pay’ proposal will help me with my $1 a year,” Jobs quipped after the measure passed.

But as Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster points out in a report to clients Wednesday, Apple did clear up one nagging ambiguity: does the company’s oft-stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008 mean that it hopes to sell 10 million phones within this calender year, or 10 million phones between June 29, 2007 and Dec. 31, 2008? It’s a question often argued in heated words in the comment threads of Apple blogs (including this one). “We confirmed with Apple,” writes Munster, “that the goal is to sell 10m iPhones ‘in CY08′ alone.”

Munster goes on to say that, according to his models, Apple will easily beat that target. “We are currently modeling for 12.9m iPhones in CY08,” he writes. “Exceeding the goal by 2.9m units or 29%.”

To do that, Apple will have to expand the market for iPhones in Europe and Asia, something it has said it plans to do this year. COO Tim Cook was asked specifically about the huge mobile phone markets in China and India, where traffic in unlocked iPhones is reported to be heavy. “We will one day enter China,” he said. “We’re not saying when, and we will one day enter India.”

For a particularly detailed account of the meeting, see AppleInsider here.

Remember Apple’s (AAPL) on-again off-again negotiations with China Mobile, the No. 1 wireless carrier in China?

Well, here’s one reason the talks may have broken down: According to China Mobile, there were already 400,000 cracked iPhones using its cellular network by the end of 2007.

That number, if accurate, is astonishing. It would mean that there are more unauthorized iPhones in China than there are authorized iPhones in Europe. It would account for the largest part of the so-called “missing” iPhones. And it would suggest that China Mobile may be far less willing than the European carriers to give Steve Jobs the hefty revenue sharing cut he demands in return for the right to be that country’s exclusive iPhone carrier. Why should China Mobile pay for what it’s already getting for free?

Of course, it’s also possible that the number is bogus, a trick card being played by China Mobile in the high-stakes poker game it is playing with Cupertino. The figure first appeared, as near as we can tell, in a report written by Anty Zheng, content manager for an online newsletter called In-Stat China. For the full text, see here.

Zheng goes on to argue that an Apple-China Mobile deal would be good for both parties:

We have never doubted that the iPhone will achieve greater success than iPod in China if Apple teams with China Mobile to launch its Chinese version. There are two reasons. Firstly, different from the US where the smartphone market is fairly limited, appealing primarily to business users, The smartphone market in China, though, is an entertainment-oriented individual consumer market. The main reasons that Chinese mobile users purchase smartphones include entertainment (such as music players, cameras and video) and to access mobile Internet applications (such as IM, e-book, and games). We believe the iPhone will be favored by these consumers as it can better meet such demand. Secondly, high-end handset buyers significantly outnumber high-end mp3 player buyers. We estimate that 20% of handsets sold in China in 2007 cost more than 4,000 RMB (US$533). In another words, there are an estimated 28 million potential users for the iPhone in China. (link)

Thanks to Silicon Alley Insider for the tip.

UPDATE: China Mobile is now said to have denied Southern Daily’s report that talks with Apple have stalled. See here.

Instant analysis from The Mac Observer’s Apple Finance Board:

Pretty much as expected, everyone is playing hardball, but China Mobile just blinked by having to issue a denial that it had terminated discussions, thereby looking like the weaker hand. They’ll be furious at having to disclose their interest in this manner - it undermines their bargaining position and strengthens Apple’s with the other carriers like Unicom. –Tommo_UK

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Less than three weeks after the first reports that Apple (AAPL) was in talks with China Mobile — the world’s largest cell phone operator with 350 million subscribers — to carry the iPhone in China, negotiations have broken down, according to a report today in China’s Southern Daily newspaper.

This follows earlier reports that talks with China Unicom, the country’s second-largest carrier, had also failed. The sticking point in both cases: the revenue-sharing model that Apple insisted on — and got — in the U.S. and European market.

It’s impossible to say from the brief report today whether this door is firmly closed or could be re-opened. Henry Blodget has argued persuasively in Silicon Alley Insider that a China iPhone deal is inevitable. The Chinese market is so big that even if Apple got only a 1% slice of the pie, no revenue sharing and fire sale prices, it could see revenues of $600 million a year. A 5% market share at today’s iPhone prices could bring in $6 billion a year, even without revenue sharing. (link)

That there is demand for the iPhone among Chinese mobile aficionados is clear. Wired early this month reported on the lively trade in black market iPhones, known in China as the “Ai Feng” (”Crazy Love”). The devices are carried back into the country where they were originally manufactured by mules from Hong Kong and sell for as little as $474.

But Apple may need China more than China Mobile needs it. Earlier this week, Chinese wire services reported that rather than relying on the big Chinese distributors to sell the iPhone, Apple plans to open its own stores in China in 2008.