Warning – this one is straight from the rumor mills, but has been reposted on more than 3 dozen Chinese news sites according to Baidu News Search. The original source is Chinese IT news portal DoNews (in Chinese).

China Mobile Ltd.’s ((ADR) NYSE: CHL) CEO Wang Jianzhou and a team of senior executives visited Tencent Holdings Ltd. (HKG: 0700) headquarters on Dec 31st, 2009, and were received by Tencent President Martin Lau Chi Ping.  According to QQ.com (owned by Tencent), the Tencent management team showcased their R&D and applications in wireless Internet; whereas DoNews speculates that such a visit cannot just be for some demos, but is in fact to re-initiate discussions of China Mobile acquiring Tencent. According to an “industry insider” (DoNews’ anonymous source), China Mobile has been interested in buying Tencent ever since the era of its previous CEO Wang Xiaochu (who stepped down in late 2004).

It’s true that China Mobile has always seemed very serious about getting into the content side of the business, and is determined to be not just the “dumb pipe”. It developed in-house Fetion, which is an also-ran in the instant messaging market whose main value proposition is free text messaging to mobile phones. That feature helped the service gain a decent number of users, bust I guess most users are like me – I only log on when I need to send some text messages to my friends and I log off immediately afterwards (you get SMS notification if others reply). Buying Tencent would obviously give China Mobile a range of extremely profitable Internet properties and help it achieve its ambition in content; the doubt would be whether there could be any synergies actually realized – the AOL-Time Warner deal immediately jumps to mind.

Taking a step back, the high profile visit at least signals that some form of discussions is ongoing, and there will probably be at least some partnership deals coming soon. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this in the near future.

The well-connected Chinese business magazine Caijing has acquired some info on China Unicom Limited’s ((ADR) NYSE: CHU) upcoming launch of the iPhone from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL).  According to Caijing (link in Chinese), China Unicom will launch the iPhone after the upcoming October 1st week-long holiday, and will offer 4 models: 3G 8GB, 3G 16GB, 3GS 16GB and 3GS 32GB (all with WIFI disabled, per Chinese regulations). This differs from what China Unicom previously showed in its 2009 Interim Results Presentation, as the 3G 16GB was not mentioned.

In terms of pricing, while the article didn’t offer the full details, it was revealed that there will be as many as 8 contract packages (perhaps 2 choices per model?). The most basic package will be the 3G 8GB at RMB2,075 (US$304) for the phone and a monthly contract of RMB126 (US$18) for 24 months. That’s a total of RMB5,099 (US$747) over two years.

According to Caijing’s sources, the lowest monthly contract of RMB126 has been strenuously debated internally and is the absolute lowest price that China Unicom can offer. This is still 3 times the ARPU of China Unicom’s GSM subscribers. Additionally, there was no mention of data plans, so we don’t know what that RMB126 actually contains. It’s definitely a high end offering for the urban elite – the question is will the iPhone be strong enough to lure these customers away from China Mobile Ltd. ((ADR) NYSE: CHL). And perhaps the biggest hurdle is that currently users cannot retain their numbers if they switch networks – this is a deal-killer for business users. China Unicom should be lobbying heavily to get that changed.