A joint venture between two Vietnamese firms and a South Korean company will manufacture first mobile and cordless fixed phones in Vietnam, a local phone operator said Monday.

IQLinks, a joint venture between EVN (Electricity of Vietnam - Vietnam's state-owned corporation), South Korea-based Ubiquam and Vietnam's Chi Linh, will start construction of a phone factory in northern Hai Duong province soon so that first batches of products using Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) 450 technology supplied by U.S.-based wireless chip developer Qualcomm will come out in July 2007, said EVN Telecom, affiliated to EVN.

The factory is expected to annually produce some 500,000 CDMA phones in the first three years of operation, and over one million units in following years. Each phone will be sold at between 800, 000 Vietnamese dong (VND) (50.3 U.S. dollars) and some million VND (hundreds of dollars), the phone operator said.

Vietnam is expected to have some 36 million mobile phone subscribers in 2010, up from over 11 million in May, local newspaper Vietnam Economic Times recently quoted Minister of Posts and Telecommunications Do Trung Ta as saying.

"With the growth of six licensed mobile phone operators, namely Vinaphone, MobiFone, Viettel, S-Fone, EVN Telecom and Hanoi Telecom, we will witness the spectacular development of our mobile communications market in the coming time," Ta said.

From late 2006, new mobile phone services based on advanced information and communication technologies like provision of downloadable music clips, video streaming (which allows users to watch online video clips on their phones), and information search will develop in Vietnam with its current population of 83.1 million, officials of the operators predicted, noting that the country currently has no mobile phone factories.

According to the International Telecommunications Union, Vietnam has ranked second in the world, after China, in telecommunications growth rate in recent years