Vodafone flips stake in China Mobile for a cool $6.6B

British wireless giant Vodafone has stakes in operators around the world -- perhaps notably its 45 percent share in Verizon Wireless -- but the company has recently made it clear that it plans to aggressively reevaluate all of its holdings, and those words are starting to turn into actions on news that its 3.2 percent piece of China Mobile is no longer. That's significant if for no other reason than the fact that China Mobile is far and away the largest wireless carrier in the world by subscriber count -- a total that exceeds half a billion -- which means that Voda's mere 3.2 percent share, acquired between 2000 and 2002, was valued at roughly $6.6 billion. What this means for Vodafone's numerous other holdings remains unclear, but needless to say, it's possible this isn't the last sizable transaction we'll see over the next few months.