Huang Wenlin, vice president, China Mobile

The numbers surrounding China Mobile only seem to get more mind boggling. The firm had just short of 550 million subscribers at the end of the first quarter this year, according to Informa Telecoms & Media’s World Cellular Information Service. China Mobile’s network consists of 530,00 base stations, with 160,000 alone dedicated to its TD-SCDMA homegrown 3G network.

Huang Wenlin, a senior economist with 33 years’ experience in the telecoms industry, is the only woman on the board of the world’s largest carrier. She joined in 2007 from China Telecom, when the Chinese Government reshuffled the state’s communications carriers. She had been head of human resources at China Telecom.

There can be few women in the industry who hold sway over such vast numbers of subscribers—and few men as well, for that matter. It is difficult to overstate China Mobile’s clout in the industry, given the sheer size of its market.