It has not been the best week for China Mobile. The operator, which is the largest global telco in terms of domestic subscribers, has been downgraded in the eyes of analysts Morgan Stanley, while another analyst, Edison Lee at Jefferies, said the company faces a ‘dilemma’ in terms of Internet of Things (IoT) standards.

According to Barrons, Morgan Stanley finds three issues with China Mobile’s current strategy; the 5G spending cycle, higher operating expenses, and how competition effects profits. The analyst called the path to 5G a ‘painful journey’ for China Mobile, as well as removing the company’s stock from its Asia Pacific excluding Japan telecoms portfolio.

Elsewhere, a report from the South China Morning Post has found that the operator ‘may be scrambling to catch up’ with its two competitors, China Unicom and China Telecom, in deploying IoT architecture.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) recently announced the country would need to accelerate its implementation of NB-IoT (narrow band IoT) technologies, building 1.5 million base stations by the end of 2020. As this publication previously reported, operators around the world are starting to dip their toes in the water with rollouts, including Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone New Zealand.

Edison Lee, equity analyst at Jefferies, noted that China Mobile could either wait for the MIIT to give it a licence to redevelop its GSM 2G network for 4G or upgrade it itself, while another issue is that its 4G network is based on TD-LTE (time division long term evolution), as opposed to FDD-LTE (frequency division duplex) preferred by Unicom and China Telecom.

Shares in the company, which were at 86.95 on June 1, slumped to a low of 80.10 on July 6 and at the time of publication sat at 80.85.