China Telecom expects continued fall in net adds

Fiona Chau
30 May 2014
00:00

China Telecom said its net profit is not likely to decline this year even if the Beijing government doesn't issue an FDD-LTE license to the company before the year-end. But it might continue to suffer from a sluggish performance in subscriber additions.

“The worst-case scenario (for this year) is that there’s no obvious change in the subscriber numbers”, chief executive Wang Xiaochu told press in Hong Kong yesterday after its annual general meeting.

China Telecom has been struggling with subscriber additions since December, when bigger rival China Mobile launched its 4G service and struck an iPhone deal with Apple.

The nation’s smallest mobile carrier saw a net 1.03 million drop in its overall subscriber base last month, after gaining just 830,000 new 3G subscribers and losing about 2 million 2G customers in the month.

Despite a significant improvement in 3G additions over its tally of 200,000 in March, China Telecom is still lacking behind rivals China Mobile and China Unicom, which gained over 9 million and 2 million 3G and 4G customers, respectively, in the month.

To lure more customers from rivals to its TD-LTE network, China Mobile has previously announced plans to cut prices for its 4G plans by as much as 40%. The entry-level monthly data package is now 30 yuan for 500 MB.

China Telecom launched its TD-LTE network in February but its 4G service is limited to a number of large cities only and doesn’t have any handsets/smartphones available at the moment. The company and rival China Unicom are both betting on the widely adopted FDD LTE standard, with hopes that the regulator would issue the licenses soon.

“Our focus of TD-LTE service now is on data cards and MiFi only. We will introduce 4G handsets only when we’ve got the FDD license,” he said.

“Ultimately we hope the government will issue FDD LTE licenses soon, for the fairness of the three operators and the benefits of China Telecom’s 180 million customers.”

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