“China Mobile and Apple both have the will to strengthen cooperation,” Chairman Xi Guohua said, according to Bloomberg. “When there is more specific news, we will disclose it.”

The company reportedly indicated that it is unclear whether a deal will be reached this year. An Apple representative was not immediately available for comment.

However, sources have said that a meeting with China Mobile was among the stops CEO Tim Cook made during a China trip earlier this year.

With roughly two-thirds-of-a-billion users, China Mobile is the biggest carrier in the world, as measured by number of customers. The company’s current 3G network doesn’t work with today’s iPhone, but a next-generation iPhone could well work with China Mobile’s 4G network, which is currently in a few spots.

China Mobile has also applied to offer service in the U.S., Reuters said, but it is unclear how well that bid will be received.

Remarking on sales of the 4S in Greater China, during the company’s recent first-quarter earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said demand for the device there has been staggering. “We felt we were betting bold, as I think many of you would have thought if you would have known what we were doing,” Cook said of the 4S rollout plan for the country. “But as it turns out, we didn’t bet high enough.”

That’s a rare admission of misjudgment from a company that doesn’t often make them. It’s also a comment that speaks to the massive size of the Chinese market, which remains largely untapped by Apple, thanks to its lone-carrier deal in the country.

Right now, Apple only has a deal with China Unicom, which gives it access to about 10 percent of China’s 150 million “high-end” mobile subscribers, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty. If it were to a sign a similar deal with China Telecom, it would gain access to another 15 million. And if it at long last brought the iPhone to China Mobile, it would gain access to an additional 120 million.

That’s a massive addressable market, and one that Apple can ill afford to ignore. To do so would be to leave a lot of easy money on the table, according to Huberty. She figures that adding China Telecom as a carrier partner would create an additional two million to four million iPhone users in the near term. And adding China Mobile would create a much bigger multiple of that.

“We estimate China Unicom has 3 million iPhone users, implying a 20 percent penetration of its 15 million high-end subscriber base,” Huberty said. “The same penetration at China Mobile given its 120 million high-end subscribers would equate to 24 million iPhones, with 14 million switching from other feature phones or smartphones and 10 million existing iPhone users on the 2G network upgrading to the faster 4G network.”

Huberty expects the iPhone to arrive on China Telecom in the next few months. Its debut on China Mobile, however, will take a bit longer, and isn’t likely to occur until Apple introduces the iPhone 5, which is expected to be compatible with the carrier’s upcoming 4G network (TD-LTE).

So, 24 million to 26 million additional iPhone users, if Apple were to sign up both China Telecom and China Mobile. And that’s the base-case scenario. Huberty’s more bullish view of the situation lifts that number to 40 million, and predicts that a few years from now, Apple could sell 57 million iPhones per year in China alone. And that is truly a spectacular number.

After all, Apple sold 68.5 million iPhones worldwide in fiscal 2011.

The China Radio Management office, which certifies cellphones for use in the country, has approved an iPhone that appears to be built for China Telecom’s CDMA2000 network.

For some time now, China Telecom has been rumored as one of Apple’s future iPhone partners, so this certification isn’t particularly surprising. Nor is it indicative of an imminent launch. There’s at least one more stop in the device’s regulatory journey. It must receive a license from China’s Telecommunications Equipment and Certification Center before it can be officially sold in the country.

But once that hurdle has been cleared and a deal with Apple officially signed, sales could begin rather quickly, increasing Apple’s addressable iPhone market by China Telecom’s 123 million mobile subscribers. Currently, China Unicom is Apple’s sole iPhone partner in China.

China Telecom did not respond to a request for comment.

CAVEAT: As MacRumors editor Eric Slivka wrote in to point out, while this CDMA-2000-compatible iPhone could cetainly be used on China Telecom’s network, it’s actually the same A1387 world-mode device that’s already headed to China Unicom.

According to M.I.C. Gadget, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on Monday issued the needed paperwork for the iPhone 4S. As a result, China Unicom hopes to have the device on sale before year’s end.

China Unicom has been gearing up for the launch for some time, and has just been waiting for this final approval from the government.

“We will start sales once we get the certificate from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology,” China Unicom exec Yu Yingtao told Sina.com last month. “It’s not up to us. We’ve already done all of our preparations; we’re just waiting on the permit.”

The device has already passed the necessary wireless regulatory tests and as soon as China Unicom, Apple’s carrier partner in the country, is granted the final paperwork, it will go on sale.

“We will start sales once we get the certificate from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology,” China Unicom exec Yu Yingtao told Sina.com. “It’s not up to us. We’ve already done all of our preparations; we’re just waiting on the permit.”

So, it’s only a matter of time now.

When the iPhone 4S finally does debut, expect big sales. When it went on sale in Hong Kong earlier this month, preorders sold out in just 10 minutes.

State-owned China Mobile, which had about 570 million subscriber accounts as of September, has long been China’s preferred carrier. But the company’s subscriber growth has slowed as the government has rolled out efforts to restructure the industry and make it more competitive.

The most recent move may provide a boost for China’s two other carriers, which are also state-owned: China Unicom, which had about 160 million subscriber accounts as of September, and China Telecom, which had about 86 million mobile subscriber accounts as of October. China Unicom has been hoping to make the most of some competitive advantages, including its license to operate a mobile network using WCDMA third-generation technology, which is compatible with in-demand handsets like Apple’s iPhone.

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Mobile carriers, especially, are building their own takes on the App Store as they look for sources of revenue besides providing simple data connections, a business where tough competition drives down margins. Many carriers want to control their own download stores in addition to any offered by the makers of their customers’ handsets.

ZTE, a Chinese maker of telecommunications equipment and mobile phones, said this week it helped build the application service – called the WoStore – and that it will support “all open smartphone platforms” except the iPhone, as well as devices like tablets.

That suggests the Unicom store won’t compete directly with Apple’s App Store in selling downloads to iPhone users, a key source of subscribers for China Unicom’s 3G mobile services, which are more expensive than 2G services but offer faster data speeds.

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Quite a change from last year and the launch of the iPhone 3G and 3GS, when it took a little over a month for China Unicom to hit the 100,000-units-sold milestone

Said Li Gang, senior vice-president of China Unicom “The sales of previous versions of iPhones created a solid foundation for the explosive performance of the iPhone 4 this year.”

[Image credit: Frank Yu / Flickr]

“We are close to sell-out and there’s no timetable for the arrival of the second batch of products,” said one China Unicom store clerk.

Quite different from iPhone 3, which saw sales of a mere 5,000 during its launch weekend, and a boon for Apple (AAPL), which has targeted China as its next major geographic growth opportunity.

As COO Tim Cook said during an earnings call earlier this year, “If you look at greater China, which we define as mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, the iPhone units were up year-over-year over nine times. We added another 800 points of distribution in China. The revenue, we have never released this number before but I will do this in this particular case, through the first half of the fiscal year that we just completed, for the six month period, our revenue from greater China was almost $1.3 billion and this is up over 200 percent year-over-year. So we are well pleased with how the company is positioned to take advantage of the growth in greater China.”

Foreign companies have few possible paths into China’s telecom sector, which is dominated by the giant state-owned parents of China Mobile, China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd. and China Telecom Corp. Investing in those Hong Kong-listed units, like Vodafone and others have done, grants little influence over the operation of their parent companies and doesn’t license a foreign company to offer telecom services in China.

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There isn’t one, and there isn’t going to be one if China Unicom can help it.

Sources at the carrier tell Caixin that when Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone 4 debuts in China on September 16, it will be sold with a complimentary case, presumably intended to head off the death-grip drama that troubled the device’s launch in the States and ultimately forced Apple to give out free cases to all iPhone 4 owners and extend a liberal return policy.

Another coup for China Unicom, the only Chinese carrier distributing the iPhone so far. Earlier this month it began selling a Wi-Fi-enabled iPhone 3GS after regulators approved the model for sale in July.

Looks like a Wi-Fi-enable version of Apple’s iPhone is indeed headed to China–and sooner rather than later. According to a notice published by the country’s Telecommunication Equipment Certification Center, Chinese regulators have issued a network access license for an iPhone that supports “HSDPA and WAPI security mode with wireless LAN capabilities.” WAPI is China’s homegrown wireless standard.

Interestingly, photos of the approved device published by the TECC suggest it’s an iPhone 3G or 3GS, not the iPhone 4.

Evidently, Apple (AAPL) was willing to customize the device for a single market, something it’s been unwilling to do in the past. But it had very good reasons: Sales of the iPhone in China are widely believed to have been undermined by the device’s initial lack of Wi-Fi support.

With that issue remedied, sales through China Unicom could ramp up–a boon for Apple, which has targeted China as its next major geographic growth opportunity. Recall Apple COO Tim Cook’s words during a recent company earnings call.

China has been interesting. If you look at greater China which we define as mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, the iPhone units were up year-over-year over nine times. We added another 800 points of distribution in China. The revenue, we have never released this number before but I will do this in this particular case, through the first half of the fiscal year that we just completed for the six month period our revenue from greater China was almost $1.3 billion and this is up over 200 percent year-over-year. So we are well pleased with how the company is positioned to take advantage of the growth in greater China.

But a recent survey of 2,000 mobile users in China between the ages of 22 and 32 by China Market Research Group, or CMR, suggests that the cause of the iPhone’s performance in China may stem from the relative unpopularity of Apple’s (AAPL) partner, China Unicom, among its target users, as well as a lack of desire among those users to sign up for two-year contracts and subscribe to 3G services.

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Speaking at the annual shareholders meeting today, CEO Wang Jianzhou said the company has a keen interest in the iPad, suggesting that a distribution deal for the device may be a topic of discussion in talks China Mobile (CHL) claims to be having with Apple (AAPL) about developing a TD-SCDMA-capable iPhone.

It also suggests that China Mobile may be getting a bit desperate for Apple’s hardware now that a new version of the iPhone that supports both 3G and China’s homegrown WAPI wireless standard appears to be headed to China Unicom (CHU), Apple’s carrier partner in the country. This is, after all, the second time this spring we’ve heard about China Mobile “expressing interest” in the iPhone and iPad.