But today these telephone titans are under threat from a host of players in China, Taiwan and Korea determined to exploit this lucrative sector. Companies such as HTC and BenQ are hardly household names to the extent that Vodafone is, but they are enjoying spectacular success.

This shift of power to the East will be made clear next week at the 3GSM World Congress — the mobile mecca expected to draw more than 40,000 people to Barcelona. For the first time, Wang Jianzhou, chairman and chief executive of China Mobile, will take the stage alongside the likes of Arun Sarin, head of Vodafone, and Ed Zander, chief executive of Motorola.

Mr Wang’s decision to speak at the event, which gets under way on Monday is seen as an attempt by China Mobile to raise its profile in front of an international audience of mobile manufacturers, venture capitalists and dealmakers.

His speech is expected to mark the start of efforts by the company to forge alliances with European operators and to be seen as a global player.

With the number of Chinese mobile customers forecast to grow from 335 million to about 660 million during the next three years, he should not find it difficult to command attention.

It is not just operators but handset manufacturers and network equipment companies that have created tremors among the mobile industry’s traditional players.

South Korea’s Samsung has enjoyed breakneck growth, watching its share of the handset market jump from 3 per cent to 15 per cent since 1998. Another Korean success story, LG, has seen its market share soar from 2 per cent to 6.5 per cent in the same period.

For mobile operators such as Vodafone, Orange and O2, the appeal of Asian kit-makers is in part a question of price. Ben Woods, an analyst at Gartner, says that the big impact of the Asian manufacturers has been on pricing.

“They have brought about downward pricing pressure and downward margin pressure. This has been a constant challenge and the reason why, for example, Nokia has seen such a fluctuation in its share price over the past two years.”

While handset makers such as Nokia and Motorola at least have the size and scale to cope with this competition, smaller players have been forced out of the market. Panasonic, for example, a market leader in the early 1990s, has pulled out of the European second-generation market and out of North America.

But the appeal of the Asian players extends beyond price to their flexibility and general willingness to please. While companies such as Nokia are notoriously keen to push their own brand name and have it plastered across the handsets they make, their counterparts in the East are willing to remain in the background.

HTC is a good example. The Taiwan-based maker has received rave reviews for its feature-packed smartphones such as the SPV500 but does not demand that its name appears on the product.

An insider at one of the UK’s biggest mobile players explains: “Nokia is itself seeking loyalty from customers and so it wants to push its own brand and is proprietary over how the phone is manufactured. But players like HTC are willing to make the phone to your specification and not have their name spread over it.”

In the field of network equipment and services, makers such as Huawei and ZTE, China’s first and second-ranked telecoms manufacturers, are also snatching lucrative orders from their Western peers.

Last year Huawei, based in China’s southern region of Shenzhen, leapfrogged Ericsson and Motorola to a $187 million order for a third-generation network in Thailand. Huawei’s bid for the contract was a scary 46 per cent below the operator’s original estimate.

Between 2000 and 2004 Huawei’s revenue outside China increased almost 18-fold to $2.28 billion.

The established players are not sitting meekly by. Recently a number of companies, including Alcatel, Vodafone and Motorola, linked up in a campaign to push telecoms and technology up the European agenda. The “eMobility” alliance complains that, while Asian countries are investing millions in researching new mobile devices, equipment and services, British and continental European governments are failing to provide enough financial support.

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